Porta Hotel del Lago — Hotel in Panajachel

I think it’s fair to say that most of us pay for hotels to have a restful night. In the case of this hotel, you’re also paying for the view. I will say that the view at this hotel delivered and it will be quite nice if you have a clear day. As for restfulness, we were incredibly disappointed.

During the day, they have construction going on. So literally, imagine a jackhammer just hammering away for the entire day until probably 6pm. We thought that was it and it would’ve been fine if that was. But instead we experienced something even more infuriating later on.

At the wee hours of the morning, between 2am-4/5am, there was a drunken man singing LOUDLY outside our door along with his radio. You would think security would do something. You would think there’d be such a concept as “quiet hours” especially in a hotel. You’d think that they would follow their own guidelines that they wrote in their own pamphlet which they include with your hotel key that they won’t allow intoxicated people in the hotel. Nope. 30 minutes of hearing this man outside our room singing, yelling, and high as a kite at the ungodly time of 2am, I called the front desk TWICE to have someone take care of this.

You’d think a hotel of this caliber (4-star hotel) would be able to dispatch security immediately to take care of this asap. We weren’t even the only room in that vicinity. There were two others that were closer to where the man was seated and singing. And yet, although the front desk brought someone up, they couldn’t stop the person from singing, they couldn’t turn down the radio, and ultimately, they could not remove this man from the premise to allow us poor folks to sleep.

(Later, the hotel claimed the morning after as we're checking out that they had actually brought the police. I don’t know how true that is, but if it were, their police seem as effective as your average bystander…Useless.)

Anyways, this crazy drunken man finally decided that his singing concert was done at around 4/5am... 2 hours after our complaint was called in and I doubt it was thanks to anyone the front desk brought up. I will never stay at this hotel again nor recommend it to anyone. What a complete joke of a hotel and...

We picked this hotel based on so many positive reviews and how well the hotel room is cleaned, and when we talk about service, we found both ends of the extremes of the spectrum. ||We arrived early and waited for our room by the pool and approached the bar; Javier was the bartender on shift and was a complete delight as he immediately went into detail of the menu, providing options and generally listening to us to provide us what we needed and wanted. Once we placed the order, he was on top of it, bringing out the food, checking on us if we needed anything else, etc. - 5 star service, and we would know, having worked in hotel management for over 25 years.||Now, to compare and contrast, on our second night we decided to have dinner at the restaurant and Ezequiel (dining room captain) greeted us, sat us and told us about all the specials available. Our teen grandson (being new to Guatemalan flavors) asked for an omelette, which Ezequiel immediately shot it down, saying, “We are not set up to serve the breakfast menu. I cannot help you with that.” The dining room CAPTAIN, the person that makes decisions and leads the team to best serve their guests, did not offer any options and continued taking our order. ||About 10 minutes later, a couple walked in and he offered the “Plato Chapin” with eggs. The couple sat next to us so I could clearly see the eggs on their plate. ||What is this feels like is discrimination at the worst (because two of our five person party were NOT Guatemalan), and a clear lack of judgment at the very least. The locals all over Panajachel were gracious to a person, but this one event makes us rethink returning...

We picked this hotel based on so many positive reviews and how well the hotel room is cleaned, and when we talk about service, we found both ends of the extremes of the spectrum. ||We arrived early and waited for our room by the pool and approached the bar; Javier was the bartender on shift and was a complete delight as he immediately went into detail of the menu, providing options and generally listening to us to provide us what we needed and wanted. Once we placed the order, he was on top of it, bringing out the food, checking on us if we needed anything else, etc. - 5 star service, and we would know, having worked in hotel management for over 25 years.||Now, to compare and contrast, on our second night we decided to have dinner at the restaurant and Ezequiel (dining room captain) greeted us, sat us and told us about all the specials available. Our teen grandson (being new to Guatemalan flavors) asked for an omelette, which Ezequiel immediately shot it down, saying, “We are not set up to serve the breakfast menu. I cannot help you with that.” The dining room CAPTAIN, the person that makes decisions and leads the team to best serve their guests, did not offer any options and continued taking our order. ||About 10 minutes later, a couple walked in and he offered the “Plato Chapin” with eggs. The couple sat next to us so I could clearly see the eggs on their plate. ||What is this feels like is discrimination at the worst (because two of our five person party were NOT Guatemalan), and a clear lack of judgment at the very least. The locals all over Panajachel were gracious to a person, but this one event makes us rethink returning...