We stayed at Triniti during the last part of our holiday in Tanzania. It came recommended by friends. This was the place to be once. Not any more.
Like the majority of 'innovative' business in Tanzania, things start well, get good reviews, word of mouth spreads, only for things to then go downhill within a few months or years. This guesthouse is run by three sisters. You would expect three young, well educated girls to come back to Tanzania to do something new, to do things differently. Well....not really.
Triniti will offer you exactly the same bad service you get almost anywhere in Tanzania. I have lived in Africa for 6 years, I regularly travel to remote locations across the continent for work and was hoping to get a bit of a better service in a place that does get quite a bit of tourists.
Where do I start? The rooms are tiny! Two people can barely move around the bed and fit in the bathroom. Everything is cluttered. We met one of the sisters/managers the first day, but then - I heard - she left for a family holiday abroad. And that's when the hell started.
The local staff takes a liking to switching the hot water off. Fine if you want to save electricity, or even the planet. But then switch it on!!!! I took three cold showers before I had to go and ask to keep the...We stayed at Triniti during the last part of our holiday in Tanzania. It came recommended by friends. This was the place to be once. Not any more.
Like the majority of 'innovative' business in Tanzania, things start well, get good reviews, word of mouth spreads, only for things to then go downhill within a few months or years. This guesthouse is run by three sisters. You would expect three young, well educated girls to come back to Tanzania to do something new, to do things differently. Well....not really.
Triniti will offer you exactly the same bad service you get almost anywhere in Tanzania. I have lived in Africa for 6 years, I regularly travel to remote locations across the continent for work and was hoping to get a bit of a better service in a place that does get quite a bit of tourists.
Where do I start? The rooms are tiny! Two people can barely move around the bed and fit in the bathroom. Everything is cluttered. We met one of the sisters/managers the first day, but then - I heard - she left for a family holiday abroad. And that's when the hell started.
The local staff takes a liking to switching the hot water off. Fine if you want to save electricity, or even the planet. But then switch it on!!!! I took three cold showers before I had to go and ask to keep the hot water on. But there was no one to complain to. There is never anyone at reception. One of the sisters told me (by SMS) that the receptionist was off sick. Ok and so? Can't you get someone to replace her? I communicated with one of the sisters via SMS the whole time because there was simply no one else to talk to in the guesthouse.
There was never anyone at reception the whole 5 days we were there. We ended up asking the guard everything: from booking taxis, to bringing towels, to switching on the hot water. Eventually the guard got fed up with us. And it is unacceptable that a guard is expected to be the receptionist and whatever else is at hand. He often used his own cellphone to call us a taxi, which will always come 45 minutes or 1 hour late.
After the hot water saga ended, one day we arrived at the guesthouse to find out that our room had not been cleaned! The response of one of the sisters (again, via SMS) was: you did not turn the sign: "please clean my room". The sign "do not disturb" was on all rooms when we arrived, so we didn't pay attention. But believe me, I have been staying in hotels for some 25 years now and I don't recall once having to put on a sign "please clean my room" to get the staff to...well....clean my room!!! I give it for granted that all rooms are cleaned every day! The staff saw us leave the hotel and go out and the lights and air con were off, windows closed....did they really think we locked ourselves inside our room with no light and no air (it's hot and humid in Dar Es Salaam) because we didn't want to be disturbed? We were out!
Then there is breakfast: on a good day you'll get some bread, a terrible fluorescent yellow juice (supposedly orange?), some jam and one or two fruits. Breakfast ends at 10 am but if you go to breakfast at 9.40-9.45 you'll be lucky to find a blackened peeled banana (Seriously? Who peels bananas and leave them to go black???). I've attached a picture to give an idea. The kitchen staff start cleaning out the table 20 minutes before 10 am, so if you're a late riser...tough luck. Again, this gets me livid. If you say breakfast is until 10am then there must be food for all guests until 10am!! No question asked! And it's even more pathetic when there are barely 6 guests in the whole place. Surely, you can peel a couple more bananas? Then of course, if you don't go inside the kitchen to ask for an egg, the staff will never come to you to ask you if you want some eggs. Again, just pathetic. The only day the kitchen staff came to ask me if I wanted something else was when one of the sisters/managers was there overseeing operations. Next day, it was back to no asking again.
This is a startling evidence that the staff is not trained properly and that that guesthouse simply falls apart when there is no manager on site (which is most of the time).
Then after I laid another SMS complaint with one of the sisters saying that I would not pay for no service, she told us we could have 50% discount. Fine. Then we stayed another two nights simply because we didn't have anywhere else to go and didn't want to go through the stress of packing and finding another hotel. We were on holiday after all! That very same night, we arrive in the hotel and there was no water (hot or cold) and there were no towels in our room.
That was the last straw. Again, I had to go and ask to get towels and sort out the water - this time to the barman. There was again, no one at reception. Then I saw another one of the sisters sitting at the bar chatting to friends. And then she eventually helped, only because I approached her asking her if she was one of the sisters/managers.
I am so livid at the fact that we paid 75$ for a room that was tiny and got absolutely no service. I heard that while we were there, the sisters/managers were on holiday in South Africa. Well, then I'd like to ask them: have you realised what a tourist gets for less than 75$ in South Africa? Please check a boutique guesthouse called Sweetest Guesthouses. They will blow your mind. There, for 65$ I get a beautifully, tastefully decorated huge room with top notch service. And because I'm a regular client they treat me like a queen - without me asking them for anything!
These kind of episodes make me feel really hopeless that anyone will do things differently in Tanzania, where you will get absolutely pathetic service anywhere, even if you pay 400$ a night at the Kilimanjaro Hotel.
So in short: do not stay at Triniti. It's simply not worth it. When the sisters go away on holiday, the guesthouse falls apart. Obviously, the staff have not been trained properly and the sisters simply don't care.
A huge disappointment and the worst experience in Tanzania.More
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