Hotreef Hotel — Hotel in Dar es-Salaam

I stayed at the hotel with my family. We were on transit. For some reason, we had to stay in Dar es Salaam for several days before proceeding to our final destination. This went in my records as the worst hotel ever in my life. Issues:||||1) We dealt with liars. They told us that they had a shuttle. That was not the case. When we arrived at the airport, there was no shuttle waiting for us. When we called the hotel, they asked us to wait at the airport. When they arrived at the airport, they took an ordinary taxi at the airport for us and we paid $10 for that - something which we should have done right from the beginning if they had told us that they did not have a shuttle.||||2) The road close to the hotel was terribly bad. Right at the entry/exit gate there were ditches of foul smelling water||||3) They told us that they had a standby power generator - which is true - but they never used it when there were power cuts. The hotel rooms are designed like those in countries without power cuts and no mosquitoes. When there were power cuts at night, we had to choose between the heat and the mosquitoes. When we opened the windows, mosquitoes stormed the room. When we kept them shut, it felt like a furnace. ||||4) On occasions, they would not clean our room. They did not change our towels/bedsheets. On one evening, they took our dirty bedsheets and promised to bring clean ones and never returned. ||||5) It is dirty place. There was plenty of dust on the floor on the corridors. Toilets kept blocking because the hotel did not provide sufficient toilet paper. Some customers would use alternatives to toilet paper which would easily block the toilets. ||||6) No trash cans in the rooms. I once saw a checking out couple coming to the reception with trash in a plastic bag asking where to put it. ||||7) We felt harassed at times. Even when there was power, someone would sneak to our corridor and disconnect the power to our room! The hotel accountant, in my absence, would sometimes ask my wife for money to "compensate" for the power we were consuming. This was the straw that broke the camels back. At this time, we decided to move to a different hotel and enjoyed our transit. ||||Be warned - this hotel is best avoided. Avoid spoiling your holiday. There are better hotels close to the airport but unfortunately they do not use online platforms for reservations. Hotreef is a budget hotel but clearly they can do better - for instance, a trash can costs US$5. I did not understand why the rooms did not...

My family (five people) stayed there one night before the very early flight. We booked hotel because it is close to the airport (which is true). We found the hotel terrible - it is not finished yet, there's still plastic on the mirrors, locks and beds, the bathroom is not finished (no shower courtain or cabin), it smells terriby, the rooms (we booked three rooms) had only one light bulb (and three holes with some electric wires there). There were no towels in the bathrooms, when we asked for them, they bring 4 (four) towels for 5 people, and they all had big stains. The black stain was also found on the bed sheet. ||||The hotel has terrible position - it is true that is close to airport, but in the middle of the slum. It is weird to get there (the hotel is behind the wall) and it is definitely not a place where you would walk around. ||||They offered us a dinner, for which we were waiting almost two hours. In the mean time the electricity went off, so we were waiting in complete dark, not knowing if we still can expect the dinner or not. NOBODY explained nor apologized for the situation. There was a lot of staff around (at least we guessed they are staff), but they were all really strange, with poor or none english and not polite at all. At least we got the dinner, which was mostly chicken bones and rice. For the price of a very good dinner in one of the top restaurant in Dar!||||I strongly advise not to go to this hotel. For the same price you can find much better hotel, maybe not so close to the airport, but you need a car to get...

Hotreef Hotel is about 5 minutes drive from the airport, going very slow on dirt slum streets - taxi cost us about $8. The multistory hotel is in a securely walled and gated compound. It seems to have been built and staffed by people who have seen pictures of a hotel but not actually stayed in one. Constructed last year, parts of it already need renovating. We chose a room overlooking the pool, as an alternative to looking at water tanks. The pool itself might have harbored crocs or hippos, anything might lurk unseen in its murky depths, but a team of staff were figuring out how to try and clean it. The sliding windows, if one could wrestle them open, opened on to a 2 foot ledge with a sheer drop to the patio below and no railing. We kept them closed however, as no screens or mosquito nets. The room furnishings were good though, the mattress good (but a duvet? On the coast? Really?) and the bathroom quite nice - very clean, but we had to hunt down the powerfully smelling naphthalene balls and evict them.||I think the staff's English was limited but our Swahili is fluent, so no problem there, they were polite and helpful. We tried a fish n chips dinner and found it to be huge and delicious, though we were puzzled that a coastal hotel would fly in its fish from Lake Victoria. ||Breakfast took a while to materialize but was filling - fruit juice, instant coffee, bread, sausage, your choice of eggs, piece of fruit.||Bottom line - this hotel serves its purpose, but don't expect to...