Issara Boutique Winery Hotel Reviews

The hotel at the Issara Boutique Winery is...complicated. The property itself looked great and was well maintained, nestled amongst the lush jungle forest of the Khao Yai valley. That said, it's also located pretty much in the middle of nowhere and is around a 5-6 km drive from the main road. This isolation is nice, but also very inconvenient as there aren't really any nearby restaurants or amenities. That isolation became a bit more problematic when it came to food. More centrally located resorts in Khao Yai benefit from having tons of food options nearby. Issara Boutique Winery Hotel has none of those options. NONE. Unless you're OK with making a 10-12 km round trip back to the main road area just to grab a bite to eat you're stuck with the food at the hotel. Overall, the food isn't bad. The in-house restaurant has a small menu of mostly Thai dishes. But be prepared to pay some pretty ridiculous prices. We had pad kra pao, khai jiao and an order of french fries. The grant total - 760 Baht, which is probably triple the price you'd pay just 10 km or so closer to the other resorts. Water wasn't bottled and was instead tap water filled into glass bottles, which I found a bit odd and contrary to how pretty much every other restaurant in Thailand does it. Breakfast, which was included with the room, was serviceable. You can order from a small pre-set menu which included things like scrambled eggs, pancakes, a grilled cheese sandwich (?!), and a few other dishes. I'm glad breakfast was included with my room because I would have probably been pretty upset with having to pay for it. We ordered the scrambled eggs with sausage and bacon and the grilled cheese sandwich. The eggs were cook well, but the two tiny sausages and ONE thin slice of bacon was disappointing. The grilled cheese sandwich, advertised as "buttery and toasted" was grilled dry as a bone, yet the cheese inside wasn't even melted. It was also about the size you would expect from one of those household sandwich makers. Not impressed. Our room was a confusing mix of good and bad. We stayed in the Junior Suite, which featured an interested loft area with a nice window to view the valley and mountains. In theory this was awesome, but in practice it was pretty much the opposite. Access to the loft was via a removable ladder that didn't quite have the stability you would want it to. In order to actually be stable enough to climb up it also had to be placed at a fairly steep angle. Given that, we made one trip up to see the view and one trip down and that was the end of it. When it was time to take a shower before bed we discovered that our room didn't have any hot water. We tried to call the front desk and also discovered our phone didn't work. The front desk sent up a staff member who, after trying to figure out the problem, said we could use the room next to ours to take showers as it was vacant (and accessible via a door between the two rooms). Problem solved? No. The other room's