Poor Service

This review is for : Protea Hotel Nelspruit

Friday the 25th was my husband's 40th birthday, a very important milestone. Decided to treat him to a 4 star hotel, an experience he never had, I made sure to book a King size bedroom as we don't have one at home.

We arrived at about 18:00, Covid 19 screening was done and we completed all the forms required.

We decided to have birthday dinner at the hotel restaurant, not a great experience. The food was cold, when we asked the waiter to warm our food and bring tabasco sauce, the waiter came back after a while with tabasco sauce without the food, when asked where the food was and we also wanted to order drinks, he simply informed us that he was very busy serving other guests and would not want to forget, he wont take our order now but he will serve them first and come later with our food and take our order - we had to wait. I finished my food and my husband was still waiting for his. Not kind of birthday dinner that I would have expected. I was embarrassed. We were allocated a room above reception facing the main entrance. My husband is a light sleeper, he was unable to sleep the entire night because of the noise coming from the gate (cars and people talking loudly to each other the whole night). The next morning we requested to be moved to a quieter side of the Hotel in order to able to sleep peacefully, considering the previous night's experience.

We were told the hotel is fully booked, the only room they could move us into was a 2x DOUBLE bedroom, I was not happy but we had no other option at the time, so we took a room available - which was not a room of my choice initially. We moved into the 2nd room around 19:00 as we went site seeing during the day. The room we were moved into - the toilet was not working, we reported this to the front office and the lady who was manning the front desk asked if we could flush manually by removing the canister top and pulling the string inside. Which we found very ridiculous from a 4 star property. I would have expected a response like: "Maintenance will have a look at it, unfortunately they do not work after hours. We APOLOGISE for the inconvenience" it made me realize that this was a known fault. No decent solution was given to this problem, we then used the toilet manually as instructed. We slept, could not wait to checkout the next day to go back home to our own comfort.

As we had prepaid everything, we expected a quick and very smooth checkout and to our disappointment it was a 30 minutes of running between front desk and the restaurant: 1) Incorrect bill was levied to us. 2) There was a bill for lunch (Saturday lunch) and we were out the entire day. 2) Requested for proof of the lunch we supposedly had, it turned out that it was a bill for another room (clearly indicated on the till slip) but incorrectly posted to our room. It took almost 15 minutes just to clear that error as stuff could not figure out what was going on. That was eventually cleared 3) I was then notified that I must pay for a chocolate that I ordered. was puzzled as this was a surprise birthday gift (Champagne and Chocolate) from our sister to my husband. I then asked why am I only billed for chocolate and not the champagne as the two were delivered together. A supervisor was then called to assist with sorting out my bill, when she checked she realized that the chocolate fee should not have been posted to us. This was eventually cleared also. 4) When we thought it was all over, I was told I am now owing R22 which was for tourism levy that I was not aware of. This should have been mentioned when we checked in that our opening bill is so much, I would have settled upon check in. We couldn't wait to leave as my husband was waiting for me outside with a car running, I just paid the levy and left.

If it was not for the activities that we did in the area, I would have gone home very disappointed for the terrible experience for his 40th birthday. I would definitely not recommend your Hotel or even consider coming back in the future.