Aspery Hotel

First, we booked months in advance. When you book directly through their site it makes it seem as you are booking with them, you are not. It is a third party site and they tell you it is booking.com it is not. When we arrived the nightmare happened. The pool was closed for repairs, keep in mind this was June not having a pool was not an option. And they never notified us otherwise I would have cancelled and rebooked elsewhere. It is a very run down hotel and for $15-20 more a night you can get a new modern hotel, which is what we ended up doing. It was when we attempted to cancel is when things got really bad! They told us we needed to contact booking.com and ask for refund. I refused to leave the lobby until we got an email confirmation with our refund. They tried every unprofessional and unethical thing they could. Front desk played the phone game talking to manager in the back room and then would come back out. I could tell she was annoyed that we would not leave. I worked in the travel industry for 15 years I know the games businesses try to play with you. She kept telling us we would receive a confirmation email for our refund. 5-6 times she tried going into the office to avoid us. She said she had booking.com on the line so I told her I wanted to speak with them. When I took the phone the person on the other line said they sent a refund email. When I asked what address they couldn’t tell me the correct one. Then I asked what was our confirmation number and they could not tell us what it was. They were trying to scam me. I called the number at the bottom of our reservation and then made the front desk confirm with them that we would get a refund. All of this took 90 minutes before we finally received email and walked away with disgust.

terrible hotel. the room is dirty and dark, small and cramped. the rooms in the hotel are inconsistent and some rooms are way bigger and more spacious than others regardless of price. classic room in main building is significantly smaller and darker than second building's classic room. same thing for the main building's deluxe room on the first level vs second level/third level. the bathroom floor is dirty and taps on the sinks are rusted. the aircon was leaking water and balcony chairs are rusted. *most importantly* DO NOT get tours from the tour agency at the counter. they offer marked up prices and give inconsistent services. they exaggerate and make up the services provided by the activity organiser to make u buy from her. once u find out about the amenities not being offered, they say that u cannot get a refund or a discount. for example, she told us that the boat would have a pool on it and since at that time the hotel's pool was closed, we booked it specifically for the pool since we had children around. about an hour after we paid she called to tell us that there was no pool in the first place and she "didn't know" about it but it had been like that for a year and shes been selling this to other people. to add on, some of us chose to go because she had promised us free wifi on board that she had "checked" beforehand. once we were on board, we found out that there was no wifi at all and they never had wifi in the first place. lastly, she booked us the big boat ride without even letting us know that there were different classes to it and just booked us economy. only when we were about to board we found out that there were 3 different classes and that passengers in economy are not even allowed to go to the top to enjoy the scenery. upon finding out about this, we had to pay 600 baht PER PERSON just to be allowed to go up. after this whole experience, after confronting the lady, she did not even care and just argued to defend herself. she refused to give us ANY compensation even though our entire group of 9 wanted to cancel and refund after finding out about the pool since she has supposedly sent in our booking already. it is absolutely unbelievable and crazy that she is still selling tours.

I really liked the hotel. Convenient location, 5 minutes walk to the beach, exchanger nearby, Bangla Road is close, but at night is not noisy. The staff are friendly and sympathetic, always willing to help. Room nice, clean, cleaned every day. Breakfast is delicious. I recommend staying at this hotel!