My husband and I stayed here for two nights whilst on a month long honeymoon trip to Thailand…
Let me start with some positives:
They made up a nice honeymoon display on our bed with towels and flowers which was appreciated and we were off to a good start!
Plunge style pool was lovely, salt water and nice and cold! Perfect after a hot day.
Good delivery service from restaurants however a few menus are out of date as we called a few places who said they don’t deliver there anymore.
Nice to have snorkels available to use.
They gave us key rings as a souvenir which was also super kind!
The view is absolutely beautiful.
Now some honest truths:
Our room C6B was very small, just enough room for our bed and a chest of drawers. The roof was a thatched straw roof allowing a lot of bugs and wild life in which I will come onto shortly.
Toilet and kitchen are both in separate ‘huts’ meaning if you needed the bathroom in the night you’d have to go outside to get to it. Lots and lots of ants in the kitchen.
SO MANY BUGS AND WILDLIFE, we understood that staying in a tropical climate we would experience animals and bugs which is absolutely fine! I would particularly expect mosquitos. However… due to the ‘luxury paradise’ advertising, we did not expect to be staying with them in our room. We had huge spiders, a lot of mosquitoes and so many lizards in our room. I think this is due to the roof situation. We had a large Tokay Gheko (about the size of my forearm) in our room. So we called for help on the mobile they give you, but nobody came to our room for over an hour and when they did come they just told us that they were not venomous, that they couldn’t get them all out so not to worry and just to go to sleep. This was disappointing considering there is a sign at reception that says they will get them out for you. And although not venomous, a quick google search said that they can be quite territorial and do bite. We barely slept all night as the Tokay has a very very distinctive and loud call which kept waking us up. The next afternoon, the Gheko had returned. This made me jump so I hopped onto the bed, when I did so, I put my foot in a poo that the Gheko had done on our honeymoon bed. I was able to identify this as my family have pet snakes and the poo is similar. Disgusting! It also made us really cringe thinking it may have been in our bed whilst we slept!
luckily our food delivery driver turned up whilst we were thinking about what to do and ever so kindly got the Gheko out for us otherwise it would have been another sleepless night. When we woke up on the second morning, my husband had a huge spider right by his pillow next to his face as he slept. There were also dead cockroaches by our bed that must have died after we sprayed our room with bug spray in an attempt for a better nights sleep.
If you don’t mind wildlife (and don’t mind them crawling on you in the night!) then this won’t be an issue for you and like I said, I do expect some wildlife in the jungle (we saw some very cute squirrels) but I just wasn’t comfortable with it on my bed… it felt like a not so funny episode of I’m a celebrity get me out of here. We were very very conscious of closing our room doors to avoid allowing bugs etc into our rooms. I believe they may venture in when the cleaners do housekeeping as they leave the doors wide open and I’m not convinced there isn’t holes in the roof.
Luckily we only had two nights booked… if we had had any longer unfortunately we would have left early. In addition to this, they had a tiny bottle of mosquito repellent in the mini bar for a cost which I thought was bizarre, for a place where you get so many I would expect this to be complimentary or at least have some plug in zappers. Luckily we did bring our own with us which was definitely needed there.
The Sundeck was disappointing, nothing to sit on or relax on so no real sunbathing going on and the decking had large nails in so you couldn’t relax on a towel on the floor. one of the panels of decking was ripped up which was a hazard. (See photos) Additionally, it was almost impossible to swim off of. My husband was a lifeguard for many years and even he struggled, coming out with a deep gash on his foot after being hit by a wave against a rock. Another family were down there at the same time as us and we all stood on the deck for about 10 minutes trying to figure out if it was even possible to get into the water. A real struggle for even the most confident of swimmers. His foot was bleeding a lot and it is quite a few steep steps to get back to the villa which was difficult too. Again, a real shame as I actually snorkelled in the bay a few days later off of a boat and the marine life is thriving and it’s so beautiful! its just almost impossible to get out from the sun deck to see it.
Everything looked unfinished, I completely appreciate this is a more ‘rustic’ place to stay but piping and wiring was everywhere which put us off a little. (See photos) I originally thought that perhaps the place was brand new and still under renovation however from reviews it appears to be quite a few years old…
Location is nice for a few days if you want to be alone (plus bugs) but if you want to actually see what the island has to offer then it’s less than ideal, even someone confident on a bike would struggle getting up and down the very steep hills. They do have shuttle buses however the timings of these weren’t ideal as they were scheduled and needed to be pre booked.
Overall a huge shame, I’m not sure if we were unlucky with our villa, or if the reviews are seeing something we didn’t but I really wouldn’t recommend this place. Perhaps if it was marketed as a ‘jungle experience’ I would have been happier but I was expecting luxury bliss as advertised on their Instagram etc however this just wasn’t luxury. I do think you can get some “instagram shots” from one angle but the rest just isn’t up to standard at all and was a bit of a insta vs reality situation.
Koh Tao is a beautiful island with so much to offer and I’m glad we stayed for a week however in a different hotel.
