Our family with two young girls aged 8 and 7 and our friends with 3 children aged 9, 5 and 3 (two boys and a little girl) chose to visit Cotonou Dec 21-27, 2009. We read the reviews on this site before the trip. The hotel would have worked well if one had been there only for business and did not have to stay more than 3 or 4 nights. The furnishing was great, the beds comfortable and like most business visitors, the main meal one is likely to have had at the hotel is breakfast. Breakfast was great. Lunch and dinner were nothing to write home about and they had nothing arranged for Christmas day despite the fact that many families with children were staying. The "special" lunch they tried to put out on Christmas day ran out at 2:15pm and lunch was meant to be over at 3pm. Shame for those of us who arrived at the restaurant at 2:15 on Christmas day! Other lapses, our flight arrived late evening, 11pm and instead of a shuttle bus, we were met with 1 taxi to pick two families of 4 adults, 5 children, 2 golf bags, 7 suitcases! Nothing for the children to do at the hotel besides having a swim and taking a walk. Thank God we packed the Wii, hired a bus to travel to Ouidah. In fact, on arrival at the resort in Ouidah we decided if there was a future visit with our families, we would stay at the resort in Ouidah and not Novotel, Cotonou but if here for business, Novotel is perfect!

The service in this hotel has to be about the worst I've encountered anywhere in the world. It's very bad even by West African standards. We found one barman who actually made an effort in the three nights we were there. The food was also dire, when it finally arrived. There are some positives but not many! The pool area is really nice and very modern, as it's mainly a business hotel it was almost empty during the day. The rooms are ok too, I think they had recently been refurbished.
Obviously this hotel is very overpriced for what you receive. Unfortunately there aren't that many decent alternatives. We went next door to the Benin Marina and the food was certainly better there. It seemed much more family orientated than the Novotel and lots of children playing in the pool. I wouldn't avoid the Novotel completely, I'd just try and eat elsewhere and probably avoid taking a taxi from the lobby - they charge about 10 times the price on the street and aren't that keen to negotiate either.

Stayed in the hotel for 5 nights. Great location, clean environment but quite expensive for the kind of service provided with no complimentary breakfast (for a hotel that costs almost US$200/night!). An international hotel should have some staff that are bilingual in order to make the stay more comfortable and enjoyable.

Turn Around Time for room service is near poor. You have to DEMAND for toiletries, daily bottled water that should ordinarily come with the room, change of towels/sheets, and wait for almost two hours for each room service request, though the staff are overall friendly. The menu/meal varieties are not good enough, there should be African, European or Continental options. We had to eat out most of the time in order to try the local food.

In all the hotel is good but expensive considering the quality of service and complimentary add-ons.

the hotel is almost on the beach, you have a 25m pool to swim laps and the rooms are clean and new. flat screen tvs in the rooms. big bed and plenty of space. if you are traveling on the aid agency dime, the daily rate is the same as the Ibis but definitely choose the Novotel. i was at the Ibis for a night and the room smelled of cigarettes. we tried to move immediately to the Novotel but were told that we had already paid so would have to spend the night. no one at ibis would listen to our argument that we had reserved a non smoking room so we moved first thing next morning.

a happy ending!