Mai Samui Beach Resort & Spa

Excellent Japanese-style hotel, very friendly and helpful staff, beautiful beach available next to the hotel and a great swimming pool, free taxi every day to the city and to the small town of Natong and, among other things, free 1 hour of Yoga per week. The hotel is located in nature, surrounded by palm trees and a typical tropical ambience.

The hotel disappointed us across the board. In our eyes, this is a former 5* hotel that has been consistently run down and is now performing significantly worse than other 2* or 3* hotels we have visited this holiday. The only positive points are the generous room size, the separation of toilet and shower and a spacious balcony with outdoor bathtub. The complex itself is also very nicely laid out, but is clearly getting on in years. We were able to check in at 12 noon, there are two bottles of fresh water every day and the staff is always friendly and helpful. There are sports facilities, such as kayaking and badminton, and the buffet seems fine at first glance. And that's where we come to the negative aspects, which unfortunately totally spoiled our holiday finale, where we wanted to treat ourselves to something with the 5* star hotel. The buffet was nothing special for 5* stars and only covered the basics of a breakfast buffet. In addition, the waffles were often dry and crumbly, as were the "cinnamon buns", which had the consistency of cardboard and were apparently a few days old. Arriving at the room, the first look seemed promising but on closer inspection we noticed the shortcomings. We have several large house spiders and cobwebs in the corners of the room. The corners are dirty, if you move the bedside cabinet just a little bit, you will also see dirt and when I opened the bathroom cabinets, you could see that they had not been cleaned for a long time (see pictures). The balcony was unfortunately not much better. The wood on the railing and on the roof was splintery and pieces of wood fell into the bathtub from time to time. The whole balcony was full of dirt and bird poop and we had to clean the bathtub thoroughly ourselves to be able to use it at all. The pillows were stained and after a heavy rain the water didn't run off and the room service only pulled off the seating outside but left everything like that (see pictures). In the room itself the wifi did not work most of the time, the TV did not receive normal channels nor was it a SmartTV and the room cards did not work several times either. The air conditioning is very loud even on the lowest setting and is aimed directly at the bed so that we already had a sore throat after two nights. However, you can't leave it off because the doors to the balcony don't close completely and it gets very warm at night. The complex itself is divided into two parts and both have a large pool. One seems to have a sandy bottom and in the front area there is a large pool and a children's pool. During our stay, the swimming areas in the front part seemed to be cleaned all the time, but still there were leaves and grass floating everywhere on the water and lying on the pool floor. The metal seating is rusted and there are broken tiles all over the poolside and entryways. There are only loungers on the beach and not directly by the pool, where there are cigarette butts, glasses from the night before and some of the plastic loungers are broken. The only thing I can say about the service is that everyone is friendly and always seems to be trying. However, there is no introduction at check-in when and where breakfast is, what the check-in and check-out times are or what the hotel has to offer. There is also no information sheet in the rooms. In addition, there is no pick-up from the pier, here there is a shuttle, but after several requests in advance, only a standardised answer is sent here and no response to my questions. Here I would recommend taking a Lomprayah shuttle for 150 THB per person and not a local taxi for 800 THB as suggested by the hotel. The hotel is also very remote and to get into town you need a scooter, which was offered to us by the hotel for 350 THB per day, which we kindly declined and preferred to walk into town to rent a scooter for a better price. At one time the hotel seemed like it might have been 5*, but now it is definitely not up to scratch. Actually, I would like to end our stay here.