Palais Zahia Hotel & Spa — Hotel in arrondissement de Tanger-Medina طنجة المدينة

Palais Zaria Hotel & Spa is the best luxury hotel in the medina of Tangier. A former palace and bank, it is located at one end of the Petit Socco. The building and atrium has been beautifully and painstakingly restored. Palais Zahia is a short distance from the port, and a petit or grand taxi can bring you directly to the hotel in five minutes.

Palais Zahia has 18 rooms and suites and was officially opened on November 10, 2017. When I visited the place, I was immediately greeted with a smile by a helpful uniformed porter who told me that I was welcome to look around and take photographs.

I was surprised to see a beautiful atrium, going up three floors with a glass ceiling showing the clear blue sky. Palais Zahia has an amazing ultra-modern glass-sided elevator.

There are quality furnishings and carpets, marble counters and tables, and intricate ceramic mosaic tile floors with painted wood walls, interesting decorative items and artwork throughout this hotel.

There is an interesting lighted mosaic fountain in the central courtyard. When I took the glass elevator to the upper terrace, I discovered a quiet and sunny rooftop oasis in the middle of the Petit Socco. This terrace has half a dozen comfortable seating areas, each with a marble table. The panoramic views of the medina, the port, the ocean and Spain in the distance are unbeatable.

The daytime male receptionist on my first visit spoke good English, but he quoted me the prices in Euros. I told him this is Morocco, and I wanted to know the price in Moroccan Dirhams. He did not give me a clear answer, mumbling that the price depends on which room you have.

On my second and third visits, the polite and helpful female receptionist spoke perfect English, and she remembered my name, which really surprised me. I was shown a beautiful suite with an intricate wooden multi-colored ceiling and an air-conditioner. The bath room had a large shower and a bidet, but no bath tub.

There is a traditional Moroccan restaurant inside off the ground level courtyard. On a lower level down a few steps, is the spa that has a hammam and a sauna.

I would compare this new hotel to El Minzah in price. If you want a coffee or tea on the upper terrace or in the central glass-covered atrium on the lower/entrance level, it costs 40 Dirhams (roughly 3.5 Euros) which is a bit high for Tangier, but in honesty another luxury boutique hotel on the Old Mountain charges a whopping 60 Dirhams for a coffee or tea.

The English-speaking receptionist also told me that some rooms cost 120 Euros or 1,400 Dirhams, but other rooms and suites are more money—up to 2,400 Dirhams. There is one family room that can sleep four people. All the rooms have coffee-makers and mini-bar refrigerators.

I looked at the palais-zahia.com web site and see no prices are yet listed (in Dirhams and Euros), and the web site needs finishing. Some pages seem to take a long time to load. But I am sure this will be corrected and can overlook this knowing that the hotel just opened.

All main public areas and the 18 suites and rooms of the riad-style hotel are heated and cooled. The decor in the rooms ranges from updated traditional to a modern-contemporary. The showers in the bathrooms have quality fixtures, and plush towels, bath robes and toiletries are provided. All rooms and suites have sitting areas and flat-screen televisions. There is strong free WiFi throughout Palais Zahia.

The hotel is quite beautiful and well-designed. Even a handicapped person could stay here since there is a glass-sided elevator providing views of the glass-topped atrium as you ascend or descend.

A delicious full breakfast is included in the room rate, and you may have lunch and dinner at extra cost in the downstairs restaurant, upstairs on the large roof terrace or...

A terrible experience overall. Palais zahia is located at the center of the old medina, thus it could be expected that it would be a noisy surrounding. However, nothing could have prepared us for the extremity of said noises. You could hear everything from the room, as if we were right in the street. The hotel obviously has not made any effort to enhance the soundsproofing of their bulding, which is extremely disappointing. When we asked the reception for help about the noise, about the possibility of changing our room, they were not the least bit helpful. This made our whole stay at the hotel unbearable. When we arrived at the hotel, we gave them our passports, then they showed us to our room. A few minutes later the governess lady came to our room and gave us only one passport and told us that the other three were at the other room where our collegues stayed at. We later asked our collegues about the passports and they said that the lady only gave them one passport claiming that the other three were with us. Therefore out of the four passports, two were missing. When we asked the reception about them, once again they were not at all helpful and claimed that the passports were given to us. This sensless conversation went on for 10 minutes, then suddenly the already mentionned lady showed up and told us that we should check our room again (where I stayed with my mother). Of course we knew that the passports could not possibly be there since she only gave us one passport. She followed us back to the room and immediately pointed to my bag. We opened it and the missing passports were there, including my collegues’ which under no circumstances would I have laid my hands on. The whole experience was extremely strange, and ruined the stay for us. When later asked about the incident, the hotel staff claimed that the passports were all along in our room, which is of course not true. About the governess lady that I have already mentionned, she tried to come into our room several times a day, sometimes even without knocking. I find this extremely bizarre and disrespectful, no hotel stuff should allow themselves to enter a guest’s room without making sure that they are not disturbing them. Whenever we asked anything from the hotel staff, to clean our room or to get some fresh towels (which were not changed for 2 days), they would always forget, you had to ask everything at least 3 times. The last thing I want to mention is the quality of the breakfast, which was also extremely disappointing. They made a fresh portion of the dishes at 8:00, if you wanted to have breakfast at let’s say 8:45, everything was already as cold as ice. The coffee was also horrible, as it it came out ot a coffee vending machine. I cannot imagine how such a high rated hotel could allow themselves such a poor quality of service. The cherry on top of the cake was that the hotel manager asked me at the check-out to leave them a good review. All I can say that this is more...

This Riad is overrated. I had specifically reserved a larger suite room and was given a very small, not updated room. The young woman with glasses at the front desk was very unfriendly and unhelpful. I was told a story that they had to change the room but this was the equivalent and nothing else was available. Finally, the manager put us in the room we had reserved. She was nice and very helpful. It was night and day from the original room, much bigger, and more comfortable. We also talked to another couple who had the exact same room situation and decided to check out after one night of their 4 night stay.

Our refrigerator didn’t work and all night long our toilet made a loud screeching noise. We told them about this, asked them to look at it, but nothing was done. This was really annoying and continued throughout our 4 night stay. It was also very loud on the street with people talking until 3 in the morning. You could hear everything. Breakfast was average at best. Probably the most annoying thing about our stay was the inability to connect to wifi in our room. You would occasionally get a weak signal but most of the time no connection. The room (besides the problems) was nice, the bed was comfortable, the shower was good, the location was very good and it was a cute place. Despite that, I would not return.

As an update, the Riad manager called me directly. He apologized and said he was addressing the issues that I mentioned. I appreciate that and his concern. Hopefully it will be better for...