PARKROYAL Langkawi Resort — Hotel in Langkawi Island

What we can say about this place is MISSED OPPORTUNITIES with STAFF and specifically roles they were given. The hotel and its facilities are beautiful and modern and I would still recommend others to stay at this place for the good points: Great kids club facilities - 1 room for the little ones and 1 room for the teenagers with a great playground in the centre which our toddler enjoyed immensely. Great mini water park next to the main pool - awesome for the little ones again! Location is top notch: right on the beach, near the mall, near the main beach. Restaurant Cassia is quite nice. Rooms are modern and had a neat function where the aircon turns off when the balcony doors open to save energy. BAD when it malfunctions which it did when we were there - and malfunctioned twice. Spa facilities were great - they even had heated massage beds! Bell boys and front desk staff were very nice. The design with the sunken lounges and the pool was very nice but not fully utilised like it should. After a few mishaps, we did get a call from the duty manager to apologise which was very nicely done. He wanted to be there for our check out but wifey gave him the wrong check out time.

PROBLEMS.... Live entertainment felt a bit like a bad out-of-tune karaoke session. I applaud their confidence but if I was paying a band to come and entertain, I wouldn't pay to entertain guests that way.. The shower is massive but the tiles were very slippery - my toddler son slipped and hit his head on the floor. The malfunctioning air-con as mentioned above. My wife got a massage at the spa and said it was pretty bad because again, the right staff was not in the right roles or wasn't given the proper training. Her masseur left the heated bed on until it was uncomfortable, didn't turn on any spa music because "it was broken" (the music in the hallway worked just fine) and her technique felt very amateur. My wife dozed off a few times and when she woke up, she felt like her masseur had dropped off her pressure because she knew she was asleep. When she asked for more firmer pressure, it didn't feel like much of a difference so she just let it go. Housekeeping. Again, missed opportunities from inadequate training or attention to detail. If you're going to fold up the toilet paper, do it for both rolls, not just one - because now we're going to notice if you don't do it to the other one! If you want to be known for 5 star quality service, might as well fold the guests pjs on the bed which you were doing up anyway instead of just leaving it in a heap on the bed. It's very small things, attention to detail that if you wanna do, do at 100%.

Pillows smells stale and our son's monkey toy was found on the floor and definitely not where we left it, after housekeeping came in. The topper that got us disappointed: on our 3rd day there, we woke up to a message on our tv asking us to go to reception to settle our bill. We had left a deposit as we would normally upon check in so we thought we'll just go and sort it out later. Coming down to breakfast, we were asked for the breakfast staff there that we need to go to reception to settle our bill. I went during breakfast and the front desk staff he spoke to asked him to top up the security deposit because we had overspent the one they were holding. NO OTHER HOTEL we have stayed at EVER asked us to do this and it left a FOUL taste in our mouths because what exactly is the urgency? Are you afraid we won't pay or be able to pay our room charges? Did it not occur to you that we can't check out of the hotel WITHOUT settling our bill in the first place?

Management if you're reading this, please remove this stupid policy of asking guests to come to the front desk to top up security deposits when they exceed...

Definitely not a five star resort.

We stayed in a two-bedroom villa for five nights at the Parkroyal Langkawi. We constantly were underwhelmed by the resort and wish we had just paid more and stayed at the Four Seasons or other high end resort instead. Some of the issues were: • The pictures and description of the villa didn't make it clear that there were three independent rooms separated by an outside corridor. This is not ideal for young kids; maybe with older kids it wouldn't be as bad. Temperature controls didn't work very well so it was usually super cold in one of the rooms even though it was set to 24 Celsius. You can't leave the door open, either, because the room will be invaded by mosquitoes. • The kids club requires a parent to be present regardless of the kid's age. Most other resorts require kids to be 4+ or 5+ to be dropped off, which is fine, but at this one, even a 12 year old would need a parent to be with them! It's especially bizarre given that there were usually more workers at the kids club than there were kids. I saw in a review posted seven months ago that someone complained about the same thing, and the staff responded that they would take this into "serious consideration" but apparently nothing has changed. • The resort doesn't offer a nanny service directly despite the artificial kids club limitation, and they provided contact info for a third party that never responded to an inquiry. There's a place called Langkawi Childcare services nearby that offers reasonable rates and provided a nanny who was good with our kids, though. She took them to the kids club, pools, and beach. • There are signs of disrepair all over the rooms and rest of the resort, like mold in the bathroom, leaky vents (careful where you put your luggage in the room so it doesn't get wet), TVs crooked on their mounts, chairs with cushions that are falling apart, algae in the pool tiles and chairs, and failing paint on the building. When it rained hard, our room flooded due to water coming in through the gap in the door. • The Cassia restaurant at breakfast has flies everywhere and usually only one out of three of the coffee machines is (sort of) working. The fruit is not ripe like you'd expect for a beach resort, and it's chaotic trying to order eggs. • The Cassia restaurant at dinner is horribly slow; expect it to take about half an hour to receive your drinks, another half hour for appetizers, another half hour for entrees, and then an arbitrarily long period of time for dessert until you manage to corner a server to ask for it. Even then, there was a good chance that they wouldn't bring something we'd ordered. The food there was okay at least; we liked the soto appetizer and the grilled chicken chop entree was very tender. We saw other guests send back drinks multiple times because they got the order wrong and also saw guests get upset with the staff over the level of service. • There are no lifeguards, and there are no staff to take poolside/beach side orders. I think you're expected to walk up to the pool bar, which is fine, but it's not what you'd anticipate from a five star resort. We ordered lunch through Grab every day, which was cheap and convenient.

With that said, there are a few highlights: • The kids club actually seems like a nice facility despite the bizarre limitations on having a parent present. • The buffet on Friday night had great selection; our favorite dishes were the stingray, butter prawns, and the chocolate cake. • The view from the adult pool on the fifth floor is really nice. • The gym has decent cardio machines, resistance machines, dumbbells, a Smith machine, and an Olympic barbell too. • The mini mart across the street has a good selection and cheap prices for snacks, drinks, and whatever pool toys...

We stayed at Park Royal for 8 nights as 2 families of 8 (4 adults, 4 children). Overall the stay was pleasant. ||Check in was very nice, welcoming and nice drink and towel on arrival, overall it was seamless and they placed us in 3 rooms next to each other as requested. The rooms are a little small, and the bathroom is too. They are nice enough but feel a little worn in places, especially the bathrooms. Whilst they are cleaned everyday and the cleaners were very friendly and on the whole did a good job, you can see accumulation of many months of dirt in the corners and these parts of the rooms should be deep cleaned regularly to avoid this as it makes the room seem unclean. ||The hotel itself has a great pool which is kid friendly, with a separate small splash pool for kids. It backs up directly on to the beach which is great and you get the best sunsets there. The sea is lovely and warm, nice waves if you like to surf. They offer a kids club and for slightly older kids they have an activity centre with gaming consoles which were great for my children. They went everyday. It feels new and clean. There is a problem with sun loungers around the pool, I counted 22 in total which is a tiny amount for the amount of people staying at the hotel. There is an adult pool which is lovely, although there is no shade even under the umbrellas so on sunny days it is extremely hot. They also dont have sun loungers up there, but have chairs instead which I found odd. ||On the 1st day at the beach, my niece was stung by a jellyfish. Hotel pool staff were attentive and had the treatment solution ready for her and stayed until she felt comfortable again. Lucky no other stings on any other days||Additionally the gym whilst not massive, feels light and modern. They have really good equipment and was the best gym we saw in the three hotels we stayed in Malaysia on this trip.||The breakfast made the hotel feel much more like a 4* European style all inclusive resort. It was extremely busy and not much space to move. The coffee was pretty poor, but we found a local coffee shop and arranged for coffee delivery each morning which helped. There was a good variety of food, pastries were great, but did feel extremely busy to be relaxing. ||In the room there was some considerable noise not only from the road but also from the rain (it felt like we had a drainpipe on our roof where we could hear the water flowing). Also we could hear morning prayers on the speakers at 6am everyday which interrupted our sleep. Additionally there is one main lift area, which has 2 lifts working, so you are constantly waiing for a lift and then stopping at each floor. We found out that there was another lift on the back side of the hotel but it only suits if your room is situated there. ||Location of the hotel is great, a shop on your doorstep and lots of restaurants within walking distance. Would I stay here again, probably not. Whilst there are a lot of good things about this hotel and the service was generally really nice, there were quite a few things I didn’t like so would be keen to try...