Ngazidja (the main Island of Comoros) used to have 2 world class Hotel: Galawa a few years ago and another big one that I don't remember the name, but it used to be in the Zilimadjou area. That was around end of of the 80's. Since then, only Itsandra seemed to be decent compared to the hotels that were built there (and god knows that Itsandra is no big deal!).
Anyway, back to Les Arcades:
-Rooms are small, have bad bad lighting, lots of moist, badly need some serious renovations, rooms have very creepy look/decoration. Very bad/old/moisted bathrooms.
-Restaurant: they sometimes have a mauritian cook who is not bad (trying his best and is very friendly with customers). The food that he cooks is not bad (courtesy of his experience in top hotels). When that Mauritian chef is not there, the food is without flavour/simplistic/with no interest. Other big problem they badly need to address: in the mornung at breakfast, they have uncovered glasses of juice left on the tables and lots of flies fly on those glasses.
-Staff: the mauritian chef is a breeze. They had a malagasy girl at the reception who was simply unprofessional: we spent 3 weeks there with 2 children and at every 3,4 days she kept downgraded us to a smaller room eventhough we were paying for better rooms. When asked why we could not stick to the initial room we were paying for, she argued that more tourists were coming in and that we had to move. Never seen that nonsense before! The cleaning ladies were nice.
-The grounds: very simplistic and not well kept at all.
-What to do nearby: well, nearby you basically have a corner of the sea where couple of fishermen do their job in the middle of volcanic rocks. There's la corniche which is basically a side-walk in front of the sea from where you can look at the sea but the view is nothing scenic...just the sea with lots of garbage in it.
If you walk about 10/20 mins, you can get to the Main Moroni Market (le Grand marché) which is noisy and very dirty/smelly. Or for same amount of time, you can head to the main part of Moroni (Mosqué du Vendredi in Badjanani area): the latest area is old, abandonned, very poor looking with only highlights being a sad looking harbour and the Friday Mosque (Mosqué du Vendredi).
Tourists should go to Karthala Volacano, visit Mitsamiouli in the North.