The hotel staff is far from professional & respectful to paying guests, specifically young female Africans.
From the moment we were checking in, the attitude from Craig at the reception was off - putting. We stayed in a one bedroom apartment and requested 2 key cards but he was dismissive. Never mind that our colleagues (African females - older) whom we checked in with, staying in a similar apartment, were treated with decency, given two key cards & as part of our booking via Cape Wine (through icommodate) were each given a ZAR200 spa discount voucher. When I inquired from Craig why we didn't have 2 vouchers, he dismissively responded that we present the same voucher twice. When I asked for 2 key cards, he said we could use one. When I insisted, he claimed they had run out of cards.
I suppose being a busy season & in a business hotel, we were to show ourselves to our room & they were to bring our bags up shortly. We however waited for about half an hour, called the reception, waited a bit longer, to the point we ended up going back down to bring our bags up ourselves. Shock on us to discover that our bags had eventually been taken up to the wrong room, no apologies for that and only upon our insistence & waiting at the wrong room for our bags quickened the process. Our colleagues bags, whom we checked in with, were still at the reception area. We had to insist that they be taken up to their room while we waited.
On to breakfast and the waiters were very unprofessional & speaking in a local language we don't understand evidently talking about us while looking in our direction and laughing out loud on all 4 mornings. Shout out to Waynard whom we encountered on our last morning at breakfast. He was friendly & welcoming and without bias unlike what we'd experienced on all 3 mornings prior to his encounter.
We had an issue with working the AC's on one evening and to my surprise, even the maintenance guy that was sent was very dismissive, talking over my questions with some attitude and even refusing to confirm whether the AC was working or not, claiming that it picks after 20 minutes.
One night, we got back to the hotel and assuming we had left the key in the room, asked Craig for a replacement. He was very rude about his approach, stating that he would wait at our door while we looked for the key card, else a charge of $50 would apply. We didn't have a problem if there was a surcharge for a lost key. But being that I was certain it was forgotten in the room & would figure it out in the morning if they gave us access to the room, his approach was very unprofessional and very unlike my experience in other hotels regarding a misplaced key card. Luckily, I eventually found the key.
At 10:55a.m on the day of check out, the reception called to remind us that we had 5 minutes to check out. I had already called at 9:30a.m to clarify whether check out was 10:00 or 11:00a.m. I have never, in all the hotels I've stayed at, received a call prior to check out to remind me that I have 5 minutes to check out. We were ready & just about to call to ask for our bags to be taken down. It seems they were in a rush to have us out of their hotel. Good thing we couldn't wait either.
While checking out, Pumle whom we only met that morning asked about our experience to which we answered honestly. She was keen to understand what went wrong. Andre (the manager as were informed) couldn't care less about our grievances - he was part of the team we interacted with upon check in. We requested for an email of someone we could share our grievances with and Andre listening in told Pumle to give his. We quickly dismissed that because how were we to complain about Andre & his team to Andre?
It's a shame that this hotel was recommended to us by guests who'd enjoyed their stay a few years back.
It's a shame that we met other colleagues attending Cape Wine that were staying in the same hotel - African men, who had a pleasant experience.
It's a good thing we were off to another hotel by the beach where we got stellar experience from the moment we checked in.
