I've chosen this hotel because a friend recommended it. I reserved two rooms on the back side for a 14-day stay. When we arrived in the evening, the manager told me he didn't received my confirmation for the reservation despite the e-mail 'read' confirmation I received... No problem at all for the manager, he got us in rooms at the front of the building and the next day we would get two other rooms at the back because people we're leaving.
When arriving the taxi driver and a hotel staff member helped us to take our luggage out.
We had a lot of luggage for work so we left these behind the reception desk, our personal luggage got our room.
As we got out of a 8-hour flight we both wanted to take a good shower before going to dinner, my colleague had all the water for himself, all I got was some air and a little extremely hot water. So I decided to wait until the morning.
The restaurant is small, has some good meals, drinks as normal. Pricing is fair.
During the night the guards at the opposite side of the road had the volume of their radio going up and at 4 AM we got shaken up (read: awaken) from the mosque' prayers!
Some loud prayers coming from the mosque loudspeakers only a few hundred meters away! When scouting the area the night before I didn't saw it... :-) As from 5 to 6 AM traffic and people are in the street making extreme noise and it was impossible to sleep a few hours more after those prayers...
When I wanted to take a shower, no water at all... Now I know that I need to wake up earlier to get some, in Africa!
Then we had breakfast, we could only have tea or coffee and choose from some kind of dirty menu card with the only food that seemed to be convenient: omelet!
So me and my colleague took both the same omelet. The portion was rather small.
We also got some bread + butter with this 'omelet'.
After breakfast we left for work (not leaving the keys behind).
At the same time I was already thinking of leaving this hotel in any way and looking for some other better valued ones.
In the late afternoon we came back and asked the manager if we could change rooms as we required the last night, which he also suggested thoroughly!
His reaction was that we couldn't change as we didn't left the keys behind and he couldn't get in the rooms to clean them on time.
I immediately told him he could have warned us before we left and we couldn't sleep one more night in the front rooms.
As most African hotel managers who don't seem to care much he didn't say a lot and we got to our rooms to refresh ourselves (3th floor).
For your information:
In the morning when I left my room I'd had left the light on in the bathroom, which was off when I got in. Also the bath water knob was repaired and my colleague's room was cleaned anyway!!!
This meant to me that the hotel manager is a liar and has vert poor to no goodwill at all to satisfy his customers.
I paid two nights upfront and immediately left.
A friend got us to a nice apartment complex where we now have a nice and quiet room, hot water and a swimming pool.
- Isimbi Hotel Kigali
