Stone Town is not the most beautiful place in the world, but the Antonio Garden Hotel was a nice oasis in the city. It had a nice garden setting and everything was clean. Things also worked well.
The hotel is located on the narrow alleys of Stone Town and can't be reached by car. The entrance looks small, but once you get inside, the hotel is midsized with 30 rooms. All of the rooms are accessed directly from the inner yard.
My room was nice. It had a separate kitchenette area with some basic kitchenware. The room was slightly worn out, but not bad. There were generic power sockets by the bed which would take at least European, US and UK plugs. The aircon worked well and I could adjust the temperature easily. The housekeeping came twice a day, during the day to clean the room and early in the evening to set up the mosquito net over the bed. There was a glass bottle of 1 liter of drinking water in the room, which the maid replaced with a full one when cleaning the room, usually also on evening visits.
As the hotel was on an alley with no cars, there was no traffic noise. However there was a mosque closeby, so the sunrise prayer call was a guaranteed wakeup every morning. There was also a school on the opposite side of the street and it had no windows...Stone Town is not the most beautiful place in the world, but the Antonio Garden Hotel was a nice oasis in the city. It had a nice garden setting and everything was clean. Things also worked well.
The hotel is located on the narrow alleys of Stone Town and can't be reached by car. The entrance looks small, but once you get inside, the hotel is midsized with 30 rooms. All of the rooms are accessed directly from the inner yard.
My room was nice. It had a separate kitchenette area with some basic kitchenware. The room was slightly worn out, but not bad. There were generic power sockets by the bed which would take at least European, US and UK plugs. The aircon worked well and I could adjust the temperature easily. The housekeeping came twice a day, during the day to clean the room and early in the evening to set up the mosquito net over the bed. There was a glass bottle of 1 liter of drinking water in the room, which the maid replaced with a full one when cleaning the room, usually also on evening visits.
As the hotel was on an alley with no cars, there was no traffic noise. However there was a mosque closeby, so the sunrise prayer call was a guaranteed wakeup every morning. There was also a school on the opposite side of the street and it had no windows (it had the window openings, but no glass in them). The pupils often seemed to repeat phrases together, which created a loud voice that could be heard even inside my room.
The WiFi was slowish and sometimes patchy.
The hotel restaurant was located outside by the pool. As a result they also served the pool area too. I had only breakfast there and it left me with mixed feelings. There was enough selection and also warm items. I ate every morning enough to skip lunch. The selection seemed to change from day to day. There was an egg station preparing eggs to order, fresh fruit and vegetables, toast, some bakery products, cereals and a few warm items. The warm items were actually luke warm. As the buffet was outside, cold items not covered were sometimes swarming with flies. The cold items were brought wrapped in a plastic foil, but many of the guests didn't bother putting the foil back after taking some food. The bakery items were not fresh, they were dry. The warm items were not up to Western standards: the presentation wasn't nice (some could say some of the items looked disgusting) and e.g. the oatmeal didn't have much oats in it. Some homeless cats had taken the restaurant as their home.
The pool area had 5 lounging chairs in addition to the restaurant tables.
The front desk was friendly and spoke good English. There was a separate tour desk.
Stone Town is quite compact, so everything there was only a short walk away, including a number of restaurants. The immediate vicinity of the hotel was quiet.
Pick-up from the airport cost $20. The price was a bit on the expensive side, but they came to meet me with a taxi driver and a member of the hotel staff. As the taxi couldn't take you to the hotel, the staff member showed me the way to walk there and carried my luggage.
Overall the hotel provided very good value. Had the breakfast been better, I would have rated the overall experience excellent.More
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