First Group The Palace All-Suite

Location: The hotel is well-situated, often praised for being close to the beach, local attractions like uShaka Marine, and within walking distance of various amenities. Guests also appreciated the beautiful sea views from their rooms.

Great place by the beach. The hotel is right on the beach with excellent access to it and a great view. The beach is very busy and can be noisy, so maybe not the best place if you’re after a quiet get away. But, if you want a hopping place, it’s that. VERY helpful people who went out of their way to make sure our stay went well.

Well, this is a hotel I will certainly never return to and that I will never book any of my clients into. I attended Travel Indaba in Durban and had booked 4 nights in the Palace hotel, which, according to their website is ALL-SUITE. Nothing is further from the truth. I ended up in a room with an en-suite bathroom but that was as far as 'suite' went. It was a bog-standard hotel room, fairly small and certainly not a suite. I arrived on the 11th floor at 2145 in the evening, the door to the room was open and two staff members were running around like headless chickens, looked aghast when they saw me and told me that they were just making the bed. Anybody's guess what happened in that room during the day. When I finally was able to enter the room, I quickly spotted a very dirty carpet, with stains in all sorts of colors and shapes, I'm not sure if that room has been cleaned properly in a long time. The seats are badly discolored as well, looking closely I assume they were once green but now have brown, red, and all manner of stains. Since the carpet was so dirty, I had placed wipes on my bedside table to avoid dragging the dirt from carpet into bed with me, as I had to walk through the room from the bathroom. The wipe was grimy despite just having had a shower. As to the furnishings, minimal, and no thought has been given to people of smaller stature, in a wheelchair, or, like myself, with a rotator cuff injury who cannot reach above their head. The safe is on the topmost shelf of a wardrobe that I estimate to be around 2.20 metres high, and the kettle, cups and tea/coffee are in a cupboard that is higher than the top of the tv. The water in the shower reaches tepid temperature at best. I have never before seen such a dirty room and I did my best to find alternative accommodation so I could check out of this horror story, but with a trade show, there was no accommodation to be had anywhere near the ICC. Definitely not the best room to put a travel agent into, who you expect to give you business, this one certainly won't. Another striking feature is that despite being on the 11th floor, the sliding window opens wide, very unusual in most hotels at such a height. The walls are paper-thin, I could hear the other party speak when the guest in the next room was on his phone. Definitely NOT recommended, do yourself a favor and give this one a miss. ps. I have meanwhile looked through some other reviews and see that they are simply following a script with the replies, going back to 2017 the answer is constantly "I assure you that these issues have been addressed to ensure improvement.". If they haven't learnt by now in those 7 years, there is no hope anything will ever improve