Grand Villa Houseboat

Wonderfully relaxing experience. The team were very friendly and looked after us exceptionally well, as others mention there is an abundance of beautifully cooked food. We hadn't quite understood what to expect so to help others staying for one night, you spend from noon to 6pm cruising out on the water, the birds and flying foxes coming in at sunset were just wonderful. We slept moored up at the river bank and then went for another cruise in a different backwater while eating breakfast before leaving. We were offered the opportunity to buy fresh fish to supplement our evening meal and to book an Ayurvedic massage if we wanted. The whole experience has been wonderfully relaxing and restorative.

Great boat, very comfortable and the staff were amazing. The chef’s amazing and the meals were brilliant.

Showers did not work We paid more than the original invoice cost

Contacted the day before to confirm requirements and offered pick up and drop off. Very friendly staff and great food.

Could provide more information on what you were seeing on the tour

We got an upgrade for the boat we orginally booked, which was a nice surprise. The boat itself quite modern and almost like a little house. The staff was very friendly. Our room had a nice view on the water with a bed size of 130/140x200 approx. The boat cruise started at 12 PM and we shipped right into the Backwaters until 2 PM with a short stop. We were served a fantastic and super delicious lunch with lots of food! At 3.30 PM we continued our cruise with the most beautiful landscape in the 2 hours afterwards. As a nice little surprise we were served fried banana and tea. Nice treat! At 5:45 PM we stopped to see the sunset. Total crusing time: 4h and 15min.

After starting our cruise the chef asked us if we wanted to buy fish at the local fish market for dinner. We said yest and made a brief stop. While we first thought how attentive this individual approach was, it turned out that the local fish market was more like a tourist trap, being almost forced into buying overpriced fish. In the end we bought 5 tiger prawns based on the chefs recommendation for 1000 rupees. Even though we were told in the beginning that the cruise would go from 12:00 PM until 5:30 PM we actually didn't cruise for almost 1h and 45min because the staff needed to take a brake after 2h of working. After sunset we actually did not dock on open water and stayed there overnight as one might have thought, but just goes back to the point of checkin. This was not really what we imagined when making the booking. The chef asked us about our dinner time and prepared the 5 tiger prawns we purchased ourselves. When being served dinner we realized that the selection of food was very reduced in comparison with our lunch. It felt like that it was planned for us to buy more food the "local" fish market if we wanted to have more to eat. Based on the comparatively high price we paid this was quite underwhelming, even though, the smaller selection of food we got was still tasty. In the morning we started our last morning cruise at 8 AM for 50min which consistet of us cruising from 1 canal to the next, turn half way and going back to the check-in station. This felt like a circus just to make guest feel that staying overnight comes with the great "perk" of having another cruise in the morning. Really don't bother - it's not worth it! Also the breakfast we were served was terrible and way apart from the authentic Indian food we got the day before. If you are into white soggy toast and artificial jam you might be happy. Although the omelett, pineapple juice and tea we were served was good, it was not worth it to stay over night.