The hotel room and staff were okay - nothing exceptional. The food was way too pricy for what you got. However, the view was indeed exceptional. The town is quaint and the Heliconia is right in the midst of it all.

I would recommend this hotel!

Sara

saralee0604@verizon.net

My fiance and I stayed in a Family suite which is a seperate little house up on the hill. We had total privacy, a nice big soaking tub, large stand up shower, front porch,and clean dry linens.

Even though it was just the two of us, and we didn't require the upstairs loft at all, for 110$ a night, the private entrance and huge floorplan was well worth it. We just walked into St Elena for dinner, etc. but took a cab on the ways back (uphill, whew!).

The Cloud Forest is worth even the seemingly neverending mini-nightmare of a drive. While never feeling unsafe, the bumpy, swerving craziness had me munching dramamine like candy.

The hotel staff was nothing but friendly. They helped us make phone calls, gave us a few drinks on the house, and were just generally all around pleasant.

We saw lizards and a few monkeys on the way up to Monteverde in some fruit trees on the side of the road. Other than that and a magnitude of bugs we didn''t see as many animals as we did in say, Manuel Antonio, but the Cloud Forest is so incredible we abandoned our monkey quest to take in the breathtaking density and beauty of the reserve.

When we checked in, the staff was semi helpful. At first glance, the rooms up on the hill look beautiful. But once inside, there def is a stench. It's in the Cloud Forest where it's very damp and the rooms are carpeted and smell terrible. The pillows were the worst I've ever slept on. You need to ask the housekeepers for towels and to empty the trash. This is important cuz you can't flush any TP down the toilet. Also, the trash can have no liners and are dirty. Also, I feel if you are on the bottom floor, that it is unsafe. The windows can easily be opened. Def use the safe (extra charge for key) The restaurant and lobby area are pretty dreary. We didn't eat the buffet, LOTS of flys.

BUT...the bartender was super nice. :)

I've traveled all over the world, and don't want or expect to have a Holiday Inn experience when I travel, especially in a semi-third world place like Costa Rica. But this is an awful hotel. The staff, with one exception -- he helped us leave a day early to go to Guanacaste when we couldn't stand it there any more -- was as surly as any I have ever met. The attitude seemed to be that it was their hotel and we were bothering them. My family and I are not "ugly Americans," and all but one of us spoke Spanish, so it wasn't as if we were doing anything to merit the rudeness.

The setting of the hotel is beautiful, as are the views out the rooms, but the rooms themselves are unpleasant. The only lighting is fluorescent, and once it gets dark, you feel as if you're in an aquarium. Because there is nothing to do at night in Monteverde (unless you want to sit in a bar all evening), you are stuck in your room. The septic system in the hotel does not allow you to flush toilet paper, and after two days our poorly ventilated bathrooms smelled like porta-potties. We had to insist on getting clean towels.

The buffet table in the restaurant (I wouldn't eat anything but breakfast there) was literally swarming in flies. They were on the fruit, the pastries, everything. I stuck to coffee and toast, and you can get eggs cooked for you. The coffee is delicious, I'll give them that! But other than fruit, most of what was on the table was cookies and desserts that looked as if they were leftovers from dinner. We ate outside because there was a staff member teaching himself to play guitar in the restaurant over the music they were playing on the sound system. There are decent restaurants near the hotel, luckily, especially one right across the street, and the staff everywhere we ate in town were very nice.

The much vaunted jacuzzis at the hotel are unheated. Not a treat after trekking in the Cloud Forest.

The hotel is in the village of Santa Elena, not a pretty town, and not any more welcoming than Hotel Heliconia. The tourist center is a joke -- the same shrugging and don't bother me attitude we got at Heliconia.

I hear that the place to be is El Establo, right next door, where I tried to book but couldn't get in. I met people who stayed there and they loved it. So if you're going to Monteverde, try for that one. (But unless you are wild about trees, I'd skip the cloud forest. I'm a nature lover, and I found it beautiful but much overrated as a placed to see animal life.)