Hotel Jaguar Inn Tikal — Hotel in Flores

We stayed for one night to experience the sunset tour and the sunrise tour the next day. Firstly, I wouldn’t bother with the sunset tour, just pay for the normal day ticket until 6pm. The sunset tour gives you an extra hour and you sit on top of one of the pyramids and watch the sun go down over the jungle. It’s a bit anti-climactic and then you have to walk out of the jungle for 30 minutes in the dark. We also had to pay to be on a guided tour for this which was $25 each. I would recommend the Sunrise tour, either as part of a group or privately ($25/$110 respectively) but you need to be up at 4am to be on the pyramid for 5.30am. You probably won’t see the sunrise itself but watching the jungle come alive is quite magical. If you can only do one time of day I would suggest this one and stay a few more hours until the sun has burned the mist off and you can be out before it gets busy around 10am. I mention this because the hotel sends an email before you arrive with the official site for the tickets. But it doesn’t mention you need a guide for the sunset tours, I thought it was only for the sunrise. So when we arrived at 2.45pm to check in and I asked they said yes you need a guide and you need to pay now. Above were the prices they gave me, we chose a group sunset tour and a private sunrise tour, Sophia (who is lovely and very helpful) billed my card $160 plus 10% transaction fee. Then she tried to get us a guide and discovered it was full for the sunset tours. This part should have been done before taking my money. Anyway, after a few minutes she said we could get on a sunset tour leaving at 3pm which was in 5 minutes by this point (we still hadn’t checked in and had all our bags), but we said yes let’s do it. At this point her colleague on the front desk, I can’t remember his name - maybe Remmy, rudely waved his finger and said it’s too late. So we said ok, please refund our money. They agreed, but then miraculously the guide called and said he’d wait 3 minutes, so then rude man hurried us to get our stuff together and go. I think we got massively overcharged for the tours by the hotel so I’d suggest doing some research, these guys probably take a big cut.

Regarding the hotel itself, the rooms are very outdated, the beds and pillows are hard, and if you have a room next to the restaurant it’s noisy. We barely slept before getting up at 4am for the tour. The plus points - the location is as close as you can get to the park entrance, the food is surprisingly good, although not cheap US$30 for 2 burgers and fries, and it’s the cheapest option out of the park hotels (although I’d happily pay more to stay elsewhere if I went back). Just to add to the sour taste left by the rude man. At breakfast we ordered a dish where avocado is a big part of it and it came without, when we asked he said they’d run out, here have some coriander. Instead my wife asked if we could have two bottles of the very small water they put in the rooms for our journey and rude man said no, however he eventually relented and gave us one because we pushed hard. This guy should not be working in...

BEWARE OF POSITIVE REVIEWS! This place is a scam. They are giving away drinks or dessert for positive reviews!! We paid $340 for three nights here and couldn’t have regretted it more!

We checked into the hotel around 9pm in a pitch black reception area. We were informed by staff that electricity and WiFi would be available at all times during our stay and that hot water would be available from 7am-9am and 7-9pm. This was a surprise for us since this was not advertised on their website. No lights were on in the walking areas or in the lobby so we had to use our phone flashlights to guide our way as the staff member led us across extremely slippery stones to our room. Both my partner and I slipped and almost fell countless times throughout our stay. The rooms are very basic and we were only provided with two bath towels (no hand towel, floor/ bath mat) which meant we were using one to keep the floor dry after showering. We were disappointed to find out that after a long day of traveling we would not be able to have a hot shower until the next morning, but since we arrived after 9, there was not hot water available. Although disappointed, my partner and I were okay with it. Our main issues with this place started when we used the private bathroom in our room. The toilet would not flush most of the times and the sink in our room was clogged causing water to backup and not drain properly. Additionally our long-awaited shower was disappointing in itself since the water pressure and temperature control was pretty much nonexistent - you could either have a freezing cold shower or scalding hot - no in between. The communal bathrooms in the hotel complex were also disgusting - clogged toilets, toilet paper all over the ground, and overflowing trashcans. The WiFi that we were told was 24 hours was also only operational for a couple of hours a day and was extremely slow making it almost impossible to get messages on our phones. The restaurant food is good, but extremely overpriced for what you get. The tours that are offered on the hotel website are actually tours held by another hotel right next door so you end up having to walk over there for your tour. Overall, save yourself the headache and just book...

I was at the hotel on February 13 with a party of 6 guests. I’ve never had such a bad service experience like the one I had in this hotel. René, the guy at the reception, was the most rude and aggressive person I’ve met working on a service oriented establishment. We arrived late at night, obviously very tired since getting to Tikal takes a while and we had been on a working trip all day. He was so slow and rude at checkin, it took more than half an hour to checkin 6 guests and after leaving our things in the room and getting to the restaurant for dinner he tells us that the kitchen is now closed and we can’t have dinner. Something he could have mentioned during the half hour we stood in line to checkin in so we could order before the kitchen closed. He then proceeded to turn the light off on us at the restaurant while we were having something to drink saying they even gave us an extra half hour when he never explained the schedule they have for closing the restaurant and turning the lights off. He said we could pay the next they because they needed to close. The next day we had breakfast (very slow and bad service) and then had a short tour in Tikal but we were running late because the service at the restaurant was so slow. They didn’t let us pay for breakfast at noon when we would do the checkout and made us even more late for our trip because he said he was waiting for us to pay for the drinks from the night before. I had had it with his attitude and when I said he was providing a very bad service he became aggressive, insisting that the service he was providing was great and that it was me who couldn’t be content with anything. My professional background is in tourism and I’ve been a trainer on customer service for tourism businesses, so let me tell you, I’ve never experienced such bad service and such a good example of everything you do not do. I definitely don’t recommend this hotel. The rooms were fine, not very clean though, ver simple, but the service was so bad that I could wait to get...