Sonrisa Villas

Standard Villa 2 / Traveling with children / 5 nights: THE GOOD * Nice infrastructure, rooms, buildings, pool * Beautiful, well taken care of Garden * Beautiful african art * Beach front * Laid back, quite, relax, due to location at the very end of Diani beach THE BAD * Very irregular, variable, quality at restaurant, with two instances where we were served raw chicken! once where food was made for our 1 year old! This is a serious health risk, especially for a baby, so we were pretty uncomfortable and made it known clearly to the manager and to the receptionist. The other instance of raw chicken was in a starter called chicken kiev balls. * The irregularity in the restaurant service and food quality was also seen in the choice of foods (some of which resembled bland and unattractive home cooking, such as ikea meat balls or pink sauce spaghetti) or on the way they were prepared, such as a too tough to chew piece of chicken breast. When we talked about this to the kitchen they said they had a "limited budget to work with" even though we were paying full board and prices that are not cheap by any means. * The restaurant and bar staff seemed tired, not happy to be there at times, either stressed, or bothered to be asked for attention, bothered to be asked for service. The hotel is called SMILE/sonrisa, but that emotion/feeling did not come through in the service we received during our entire stay. It is possible that the whole Covid pandemic is affecting the staffing levels and moods at the hotel, but something needs to be done to address this as it is affecting the quality of service offered to clients who like us are paying important part of their hard earned income to vacation here * It should be well known to anyone booking this property that, although being at the end of Diani means quite and relax, it also means that the property is on a stretch of beach that is not suitable for swimming, both because it is full of sharp rocks and because the tides/currents bring to this corner of the beach tons of algae every day, as well as debris/trash from up the beach (plastic bottles, covid masks, bags, etc). * The hotel pays for a couple of young men to work very hard everyday to dig in the algae into the sand, but they should also be working to collect the garbage, plastic, debris brought in with the tides, both because of aesthetic and environmental reasons