Marruá Hotel — Hotel in Região Geográfica Imediata de Jardim

SUMMARY||||Reasonably clean and reasonably well appointed (albeit basic hotel). Appalling customer service. ||||My wife and I stayed in this hotel for a week. Bonito is a fantastic place to visit - the surrounding geography is incredible. This hotel, however, is not. ||||Pros||||1. Reasonably clean room||2. Decent enough pool area and grounds (although the pool itself seemed a little dirty at times and chlorine use was on the heavy side).||||Cons||||1. Appalling customer service. There was one young lad who was friendly and helpful. Apart from that the staff were: i) not very approachable and actually quite cold (quite unusual in Brazil); ii) generally obstructive and difficult - rather than try to solve any issues we had, they would throw up barriers. I list below some specific examples of issues we had with the staff. (I have gone into quite some detail - as much for the benefit of the hotel management as prospective guests.)||||2. Location: the hotel is a good 20 minute walk to the centre of town and is not in a particularly pleasant area.||||3. None of the staff speak English. I speak a little Portuguese and my wife is Brazilian so this was not a huge issue for us but it was a little surprising in a hotel of this size in a touristy area like Bonito.||||4. A safe was provided but it was not fixed to the wall, rendering it useless. I could have picked it up and walked out of the hotel with it!||||5. Breakfast / restaurant area is a bit dark and dingy. Feels a bit like you are eating in a basement. (The breakfast itself I would describe as adequate - no more.)||||6. Poor WiFi.||||CONCLUSION||||The hotel could be improved vastly if the staff simply received some basic training in customer service. Manager presence was generally lacking too. We did not feel looked after. As it stands, avoid.||||EXAMPLES OF POOR CUSTOMER SERVICE||||A. Night one: our toilet would not flush. When we reported this to reception we were told that there was nobody available to look at it until tomorrow morning. On that basis we asked if we could be moved to another room. We were told that we could not move because this was "a fixable problem". Unimpressive. We asked if the hotel was full and we did not get a straight answer. Our sense was that there were spare rooms but that it was easier for the receptionist to just say no than for her to do her job by coming up with a solution to the problem and keep her guests happy. Eventually but only after we had pushed the issue hard she said that she would ask someone to have a look while we were out to dinner. Why she couldn't have simply made that proposal in the first place was beyond us. To the credit of whoever looked at the toilet, they did fix it.||||B. Bonito is all about the tours to the surrounding areas, many of which start very early in the morning. Two of our tours started before the hotel's breakfast started. We made what we thought was a pretty reasonable request that the hotel provide us with a couple of simple items the night before so we would not miss out entirely on the breakfast which we were paying for of course (and would have to pay for regardless of whether we went to it or not). We were NOT asking them to open the restaurant early for us. All we were asking was that they provide us with a banana, an apple and a yoghurt each the night before! This would cause no additional cost or hassle to the hotel. However, we were told that we would need to pay an additional 15 Reais each. The receptionist (same one as referred to in A above) fed us some bull about the catering service being outsourced as a excuse. When I said that I would like her to report my discontent to the manager she suggested I fill out a feedback form instead! Unimpressive.||||C. My wife was suffering with a severe stomach ache one evening. She phoned the reception to see if they had any pain killers. She was told they did not. She explained that she was in severe pain and asked if there was a 24 hour pharmacy in Bonito. She was told there was not. She then continued to suffer a very uncomfortable night and got very little sleep. A couple of days later, we noticed a very obviously marked 24 HOUR pharmacy on the main street in Bonito. The theme (to our minds) is that the staff would rather say "No" to make their lives easier than try to help their guests and improve their guests' experience.||||D. Our tour agency (not the hotel) made an error with our transfer booking one day - they sent us a text message the night before the tour saying we were to be collected at 8am (the correct time should have been 11am). By the time this came to our notice the tour agency had closed so we could not contact them to get the transfer time changed. As we had been up at either 4.30, 5.30, or 6am for the previous 5 days to do various tours we had been hoping for a lie in on this particular morning. We preferred not to get up at 7am to call the tour agency to ensure the transfer was cancelled and we would not be woken in the morning unnecessarily. We explained all this to the hotel reception (for the avoidance of doubt, my wife conducted the conversation in Portuguese) the night before and asked that they phone the tour agency on our behalf the following morning so that we could have a lie in (we were on holiday after all). They told us it would be done. Owing to previous experience of the reception staff it did not surprise us that notwithstanding the efforts we had gone to the night before, we got a wake up call at 7.45am the following morning telling us that our transfer was waiting. The hotel had failed to act on our request and phone the tour agency. We were therefore required to speak to the tour agency ourselves.||||E. On checking out and paying for our 7 night stay, my wife noticed a sign for an organisation of which she is a member. On asking about this she was informed that members were entitled to a 10% discount. She produced her membership card. She was then told that we would not be getting a discount because the card needed to be produced when making the booking (notwithstanding that we were paying for it now). She pushed the issue and was then fed a line that the discount could not be effected that day because the "reservation manager" was not there. Apparently if we had been checking out the following day when the reservation manager was there, we would have got the discount! This smacked of utter nonsense - our sense was that the receptionist was simply trying to escape giving us the discount. The "manager" was there incidentally - we knew this because the receptionist had quizzed him about something else as we were checking out. He did nothing to try to sort...

I was very disappointed with the hotel. I do not mind the simple room, that we hit our hips and knees trying to get across the room for 3 people. That I can really get over!! |Service ladies talk loud through the hall (we stayed close by the front-desk); the Internet is a nightmare. If you choose to use their own computer assuming speed would be faster, they will charge you per minute and still say connection maybe poor because town does not have 3G. So... To get a bad connection, just hangout at the lobby and use lame wi-fi. If you need towels for activities (extras besides the shower towel) you have to pay, BRL 3 each! If you want to use security box to keep your belongings, you have to pay, BRL 2 / box... I feel like I get nothing and still have to pay for anything other similar places would include as part of courtesy. Breakfast is huge! Breads, cookies, cakes... And more cakes and breads.. If you are on a low sugar or low gluten or low lactose (or all of them), you really just can stick to 3 or 4 fruit / juices options they offer.||They do keep coffee and tea available at main lobby the entire day, which is nice.. ||Room is clean. Toals are clean. Service will not amaze you...

Bonito is a town that on top of its amazing nature you can find great easygoing people! Unfortunately not in this Hotel! The check in was already awful! Very rude! The girl didn’t bother looking at our faces to say a quick welcome! She only handled the form, even to my child lol - never saw that anywhere! And to me it’s something pretty basic, after guests travel so many hours to come to your hotel! During our stay, we had many situations with arrogant, not friendly staff! The girl at the pool bar gives bad looks, like guests bother her! While the young guy is very friendly and helpful! ||On the first day, had to change rooms, bc our shower was burning and there was no way to make it warm... then I heard that all their showers work like that! Impossible to even put a hand in the water! ||Finally change rooms, it was much better!||Nice area, rooms are ok, internet is so so...||Id think twice before coming...