I'm so relieved to see some balanced reviews for this hotel coming through now. We stayed in December 2012 and I have been hesitant about posting a review as all the rest were glowing reports and I wandered if we had missed something special about the hotel.
The location is good, opposite the beach (which is lovely) but as another person has mentioned the area of Karon/Kata has changed a lot over the last few years as have the type of tourist that now seem to stay there.
The rooms are quite tired, there are large gaps between any door frame so we got lots of insect bites from bugs coming in plus the door that could be used for adjoining rooms isn't sound proof so woken up each morning by the people next door at 6.30am going to breakfast.
The bathroom has really poor lighting, limited space to put cosmetics on and our sink leaked the whole time.
Balconies are tiny and with large chairs so make it virtually impossible to sit comfortably.
Whilst check-in and check-out were very speedy any questions to the reception staff - even "do you know how much a taxi to Nai Harn beach would be", were met with blank looks, normally reception staff would have jumped at the chance of trying to organise a hotel taxi.
The room was often cleaned very late in the day i.e after 5pm, which isn't great if you have spent the day on the beach and want to come back and once the room wasn't even cleaned at all.
I would go back to Karon again but I'm sure there's got to be better hotels - even if this one is meant to be number 4 on the ranking on Tripadvisor.............

This was the last of 3 properties we stayed at during our recent trip to Thailand and my review is probably colored by the fact that we liked the previous two much better. Also, the checkin and checkout experiences left much to be desired. More on that at the end of the review.

The hotel itself is in a good location across the street from Karon Beach though it can take a while to cross the street because of the cross traffic. Also, the hotel has no lounge chairs and umbrellas of their own on the beach; these need to be rented from a private operator.

The property itself, while of somewhat old construction, has been kept in mostly good shape. I agree with other reviewers who say it is 3 star at best. The once exception to the state of the rooms is that there was rust/mold on the flexible hose to the showerhead in the tubs in both of our rooms. We had the Superior rooms on the ground floor that connected in the back to the swimming pool which was a nice design touch. One thing to note is that there are plantation style windows between the bathroom and the living areas and their construction does not allow for complete privacy from other occupants while in the bathroom. This may be a problem for some guests though it wasn't for us.

Breakfast was self-service and in an area with open walls which allowed the local birds to drop by. We found this cute but could see that other guests were annoyed by this. The selection was large and diverse.

The staff is very polite in general but, even those at the Front Desk, struggle with English. The hotel and the neighborhood must be popular with people from the erstwhile Soviet block countries because the signs and menus were in Cyrillic; I wonder if the staff's spoken Russian is better than their English.

Now for the big negatives. At check-in, they asked for the rooms to be paid in advance and ran our credit cards. Then they told us the hotel was full and gave us a strong pitch to move to other of their other properties, either at Patong which is not too far away or at Khao Lak which is 2+ hours away. After strong protests from us, it being evening already, they backed off and said this was only a suggestion that would improve our quality of stay. I think this was unprofessional since they took our money before bringing this up.

Also, they said that we could settle our accounts in cash when we checked out even though they had run the credit cards. At actual checkout, they said we had paid at checkin and it was too late to change the form of payment.

I'm still having a hard time this was entirely due to language/communication problems and it cast a shadow over our stay though I have not dinged the overall rating because of it.

If I had to use just one word to describe this hotel, it would be this: avoid!

Old and dirty (hairs in the shower from previous occupants) with supremely unfriendly staff (not all - but reception was particularly bad though) for whom any request was met with the sort of reaction you might expect if you'd asked them to perhaps donate a kidney as opposed to, say, organise a taxi to the airport.

The room was probably chic sometime in the mid 70s; an era from which the television, furniture and bathroom would no doubt feel at home. Two crappy lumpy pillows, two threadbare towels whose best days were long gone, a shower that alternated between freezing cold and boiling hot.

The good? It was close to the beach. And, err - that's about it. Don't be fooled by the photos of the pool - it's really a small moat with far too few loungers for the size of the hotel.

The worst part was the price. Ok, so we stayed over new years eve - you expect a price hike - but I'm now back at the Sofitel in Bangkok which is costing me half the price for twice as many days - and _everything_ is twenty times better than this dump.

Spent 6 nights here over new year 2013 period. Very clean hotel, incredibly friendly staff. Included breakfast was excellent with a great choice for all tastes. Stayed in a Superior room with pool access which was ample in size and cleaned and maintained daily. Location is great for beach lovers, out of the drive across the road and your there. Plenty of free bottled water supplied daily. Check in and check out were quickly and efficiently dealt with. We certainly have no complaints about using this hotel and thoroughly enjoyed our stay here. Spa was very reasonably priced for a hotel spa which in Thailand are usually a rip off but not in this case and our visit was a truly fantastic experience.