Mona Chiang Mai Boutique — Hotel in Chiang Mai Province

The only element of the stated name of this hostel that is apt or accurate is 'Mona' – because a stay here is quite likely to make you want to moan. And so here I go...||||The fact is that my expectations were set in a certain way by this institution being called a 'boutique hotel'. But in fact (as I got its remarkably unpleasant manager to admit to me) it’s nothing more than a "guest house", or rather what I would in fact call a hostel. ||||[N.B. In the interest of being 100% accurate as well as truthful – something that I believe the owners and managers of the 'Mona' are not being - I checked the hostel's listing on the Hotels.com website I used and it's called 'Mona Chiang Mai Boutique'. But the implication is clearly that this is a 'boutique hotel', not a 'boutique HOSTEL'. After all, the website is not called Hostels.com. Moreover, it is described as an “Art Deco hotel with bar/lounge” and I can categorically assert that as absolute drivel.]||||So my expectations were relatively high. I had paid quite a lot too: as a regular visitor to Chiang Mai, I know USD 220 for three nights, even in high season, should get you a nice room in a well-managed and well-located hotel. On previous visits I’ve paid about the same to stay in genuinely wonderful places: given that tourism is such a large part of its economy, the city is full of small ‘boutique hotels’ that are comfortable, classy and well managed. Mona has jumped on the ‘boutique’ bandwagon and fails on all those counts. But even this would be just about acceptable if only it was advertised with more honesty.||||The experience began to disappoint from the very beginning. An early flight meant I arrived at about 11am. I had seen that check-in time was 2pm but since the stated check-out time on the Hotels.com listing is 11am, plus it’s a small place (only seven rooms, I think) and I was checking in for three nights, I thought they might be kind enough to make getting the room ready for me a priority. However, the manager (who was unwelcoming, unsmiling and impolite from the start) said categorically that I would have to wait until 2pm as this was ‘hotel’ policy. I queried whether it would really take them three hours to get the room ready and he simply said, unhesitatingly and unblinkingly, “yes”. Not the best example of doing your best to (quite literally) accommodate your customer.||||But what really annoyed me was that when I was eventually able to check in (late at night, after various work duties), the room itself was not only disappointing but hadn’t been as thoroughly cleaned as one would expect in a proper hotel (especially one that insists on taking three hours to clean the room). For example, my photo shows what I found behind the sofa when looking for one of the (very few) power sockets. [I won’t go into detail but there was something made of rubber in that tissue]. ||||The room itself - while large and quite well furnished - was completely impractical. The photos on the Hotels.com listing have been taken ‘artistically’ by a professional paid to just that, which is fair enough and they’re not completely misrepresentative as the owners clearly paid quite a lot of money recently to refurbish the place. But it’s not guest-friendly: there wasn’t a bedside table or a bedside light, for example. These aren’t the kind of things you really need to think about when you book hotel accommodation: you just expect them to be there. But when they’re not, you really notice them: it was a real pain. Furthermore, any attempts to make the place ‘classy’ were fundamentally undermined by the tacky kinds of paper sign you get stuck to walls in backpacker hotels telling you to keep the noise down (see photo).||||Importantly: there is no restaurant and no room service. They provide a breakfast in the morning but other than that, there is literally nothing to eat or drink, apart from the bottles of water in the room. I was told I could get food at the nearest 7-Eleven, which was apparently “not far”. However, it turned out to be a 15-minute walk away that required me to take a taxi back. [As noted elsewhere, the hostel is in a fairly remote residential area – but this which wouldn’t have been a problem for me if they had a kitchen open for less than two hours a day or could at least provide snacks].||||So I spent as little time as possible at this place, I’ll never go back, and I’ve just wasted an hour of my weekend writing this: all because of the extreme unfriendliness (the manager reached Basil Fawltey levels in terms of his unsuitability for a customer-facing role in the hospitality and tourism industry) and lack of the basic levels of service you expect from a hotel, especially one that describes itself as ‘3-star’ (N.B. in many countries that could be grounds for legal action).||||In conclusion, I credit the Mona people with inventing the ‘boutique HOSTEL’ as a business concept, providing backpacker groups or families on a shoestring with large rooms that are well furnished. Who knows, this could be a ‘blue ocean’ strategy in a highly competitive industry. ||||But I will not wish them well in this endeavour until they start using the word ‘hostel’ in their marketing and abandon all pretence that this is a hotel. At the moment thet are being deceitful - and claiming it’s a 3-star one is insulting to guests given that the level of service falls so far short. They are being duplicitous and until this changes, they will continue to have guests like me who will be highly disappointed and feel they have been lied to. I urge sites like Hotels.com to do something about this kind of...

We booked online for just a night while doing a flight in/out the next day. Easy process check in, terrific English speakers. We booked this place mainly because of the huge king bed and the free airport transfer advertised on their website. Asked about it when checking in and they said they are the new owners (less than a month) and had no idea. They still honored the agreement, stress free and were more than happy to pay for a taxi for us since they no longer had a transfer service. ||Our flights also left early and we had to be up at 4. Our package online we had brought breakfast and we weren’t expecting anything at that time but the new owner had prepared us breakfast! Eggs omelette, sandwich, coffee and even something sweet- how kind. ||We wish we could have stayed longer we will definitely stay there again and 100% recommend to anyone. Rooms were clean, well organized and bed...

booked Mona Chiang Mai Boutique Hotel as have stayed there before in 2015 and was very happy with accommodation, service and food, however this time in 2018 it was a total turn around, obviously the owners have changed and the place is now completely run down, there appears to be no maintenance ever be done, the shower was broken and unusable, the wash basin leaked on the floor and made it very slippery the floorboards were warped and uneven to create a hazard by tripping, the breakfast were two slices of frozen bread with no butter, coffee had to be self made and for second cup the water was cold. The outside was still muddy and un cared for the bicycles that used to be for hire were dumped around the corner. All together a very bad experience, so bad that we stayed only one night and moved out next morning to find a...