Hotel las Orquideas

Fab staff, grounds and pool - we had a great time!

This hotel was kind of in a remote area outside of town but we were pleasantly surprised at all the amenities. After a 3 hour drive through the mountains, we were exhausted and so happy there was a restaurant on site. The pool area was great. The room was pretty rustic, but ok. The unfortunate part was that is is Cicada season and the noise was deafening. The pool had hundreds of dead cicadas but the pool guy was trying his best to keep up with cleaning it out. Staff was all super friendly and helpful.

Hotel las Orquideas is a great option for a very reasonably priced stay in fantastic green surroundings. There are various pools, including pristine hot pools (much bigger than mere tubs). All the staff were very approachable, flexible and proactive in their approach to customer service. The restaurant bar offer excellent food, cocktails and value.

We had 2 rooms (we had first booked 3 nights and then extended to 4, but they couldn't put us in the same room for all 4 nights, although initially they said we could keep the room we had on the first night, we were told later in the day that we couldn’t). The first room (I think it was 114) was passable, had a nice balcony and views and was near the river (was on top of another room, with no other rooms on the side) so all you could hear was the nice noise of water running through the night, very soothing. However the room was missing a lot of basic things you expect from a hotel, i.e. bedside table lamps, a place to put your suitcases (folding stands), anywhere to hang your clothes (there was only some shelves, with no hangers), and more absurdly, there were no hooks in the bathroom to hang ANY towels. Zero, no kidding. I've stayed in crappy hotels, cheap hotels, even shared bathroom hostels, and there's always been a place to hang towels. There were 4 hooks outside the bathroom for hanging clothes and that was it. The bathroom window had no mosquito net, so bugs would come in if we opened it, but we couldn’t even open it as it had been installed… backwards! Then we were moved to what we were told was "a better room" (202). I don't know what kind of hallucinations the staff were having, but this was a 10 times worse room than the first, it was half the size, stuck with paper thin walls to another room, where we could hear EVERYTHING, baby crying since 4 in the morning, guy snoring all through the night, even his farts could be heard, again, I've stayed in rooms with paper thin walls, but never anything like this. To add insult to injury, in the 3 nights we got 3 cockroaches in our bathroom (yes, the hotel is in the middle of nature, and I'm not expecting that there won't be any animals, but in all other hotels that know they have this issue, there's a little plastic cover you put over the drain in the shower and bathroom, to prevent "creatures" from coming up the pipes (we even have this in our home, it's a cheap and easy solution, and we've seen it in other hotels with the instruction "after you take a shower, cover the drain again". Very simple and you keep customers satisfied and the cockroaches in their place!). This second room had no hooks in the bathroom (like the first room), but also no hooks in the room EITHER! And of course no place to put your suitcases, apart from the floor, where the cockroaches could happily walk over them… We asked for a folding stand for the suitcases and they brought us instead some plastic hangers… only there’s NO PLACE to hang them from, so they were absolutely pointless. Pool towels are provided, but there’s no where to hang them to dry outside the room (and of course there isn’t inside either!), we noticed that some rooms had 2 plastic chairs and table outside of them, where people would leave their pool towels to dry, but our second room didn’t have any either… I feel like the hotel has invested a lot in the common areas, but seems to have no experience on how to create efficient and user-friendly rooms. The reception staff made a point that a lot of customers have complained about these issues multiple times, but the management is not listening. You can not have a hotel without hooks to hang your towels/clothes, without any surface area (apart form the floor) to open your suitcases on, and without bedside tables/lamps on all sides. You don’t need to have 2 double beds in a double room, and leave no space for luggage storage/bedside tables, if I wanted a room with 2 double beds I would have booked a room for 4 people, not 2! The management really needs to listen to the customer complaints and put some basics in, and also some serious insulation between rooms is required. Once these issues are fixed it would be a nice hotel to stay in, but as it stands, it’s pretending to be a “resort” with amenities that less than a cheap hostel. Oh, and please scrap the paper bracelets, it's only b