Kiambu Holidays from £768

The Sarova Stanley Hotel is an old fashioned downtown hotel leftover from a different era. Everything was right about the place. A beautiful facility, well cared for. Good food in the restaurants. I happened to have come down with a bad cold while in Nairobi. The staff gave me a little extra TLC. The lobby staff were particularly helpful in helping foreign visitors such as ourselves navigate the complexity of modern Nairobi.

Room and facility were excellent. All the staff except the from desk staff are lovely. (Everyone who works at the front desk seems to be having a perpetual terrible day.) The biggest issues are that the a/c in our room did not work. When we tried to turn the thermostat down to cool, the knob came off and someone had stuffed the crevice with toilet paper to hold the broken dial knob on. We told the front desk and they promised to send engineering. All day long engineering did not come. Another extremely hot night in the room with no a/c. We reminded the front desk the next day and still no engineer came at all. So our entire stay was spent with no a/c and zero attempt to fix it despite bringing it to their attention. To make matters worse, the shower water gets barely warm so you can’t even enjoy washing the sweat off from being so hot in your hotel room all night. Housekeeping only came the first of three days, for no explicable reason. And there are little things that simply should not happen at a “luxury” hotel. Like the consistently broken coffee carafe at breakfast. It does not work and staff expects you to keep pushing the top down for ten minutes to get a drip of coffee to come out. Looking at past reviews, people have been complaining about this broken $10 coffee carafe for years and they’ve never replaced it. Absolutely bizarre. Given their apparent refusal to ever repair or replace a simple coffee carafe, there is no hope whatsoever for the a/c.