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Dhow Palace Hotel

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  • Kenyatta Road Vuga - Stone Town
     Zanzibar, Tanzania
    +255 24 2233012
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Cat19
Cat19
First Reviewer
4 out of 5
Avg. Member Rating
2
Reviews
4
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In the Heart of Historic Stone Town

  • November 11, 2009
  • Rated 4 of 5 by nofootprint from Halifax, Nova Scotia
In the Heart of Historic Stone Town

We felt so welcomed upon our arrival. The staff are friendly and professional. We were given a free tourist guidebook and they booked our tours for the next day The rooms circle a courtyard and are filled with beautiful antiques. As we are visiting during Ramadan many restaurants are not opened during the day. We
can have lunch at the snack bar by the pool in our hotel however. The pool is right in the center of the courtyard that all the rooms from above look down . It too public for my liking. Internet is fast and a$1.00 for a half an hour .

We really like our room. Its comfortable with a net over the bed and we even have a balcony. There is a fridge and TV in the room.
Editor Pick

Charming and Historic Hotel

  • August 26, 2009
  • Rated 4 of 5 by Cat19 from Stocking Pelham, United Kingdom
Charming and Historic Hotel

The Dhow Palace Hotel was my home for the three nights I spent in Stone Town, Zanzibar. As was the case with other hotels on this organised trip, I did not select the hotel and merely discovered I would be staying here during the course of my trip.

I flew to Zanzibar from the Selous Game reserve and after reclaiming baggage we set off on the ten minute drive to the hotel. As we were in a group of thirteen, checking in was perhaps a bit more of a palaver than it would be for most people but nothing to grumble about. Whilst we waited for the staff to get organised we admired our surroundings in the lobby.

The building the hotel now occupies is over a hundred years old and was formerly a merchant’s home. It simply oozes history and charm and is liberally furnished and decorated with East African and Arabian style furniture and artwork. The courtyard houses a small swimming pool, which I believe is quite unusual for hotels in the town centre.

With the formalities completed my husband and I were soon being escorted to our room, we were on the first floor in a room directly at the top of the stairs. The room was enormous and the style of furnishing we had seen downstairs continued in here. This is certainly no plush hotel, but it has bundles of style. Our room contained three traditional Swahili style beds, made of dark wood, four poster and very high, we needed little set of steps to get up. The beds are not very wide, but as we had three we took one each. The room contained other traditional style pieces of furniture. The bathroom was decorated in bright blue tiles and was of Arabian style, I found it quite hot and stuffy in the bathroom as the effects of the air conditioning in the room did not reach this far.

There are 28 rooms in the hotel and the hotel literature states that most of them have balconies, we must have been unlucky then as ours did not. It did overlook a central courtyard, but I did not like this as I felt my privacy was compromised, the other rooms around the courtyard could see straight into our room.

After a week of staying in accommodation with no air conditioning, I was very glad to find that the hotel has both fans and air conditioning units, although ours had a tendency to leak water all over the floor. The staff were quick to respond to our request for assistance and indeed throughout our stay we were pleased with the standard s of service and the general friendliness of the staff.

We did not eat any main meals in the hotel but we had breakfast every day. This is served on the roof terrace, we had to take a couple of flights of stairs as there is no lift here. I found the breakfast quite unremarkable, edible but not a fantastic start to the day.

The location of the hotel is fantastic, right in the centre of the old town on the main road. Stone Town is not terribly big though so it probably i snot hard to go wrong with hotel location generally. I would be more than happy to stay here again were I to return to Stone Town and at around US$100 a night this represents good value for money.

From journal Tanzania and Zanzibar 2009

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