We booked our African Premium Room through the Intercontinental website a few months before our stay in June 2007. My queries sent with my web booking went unanswered. We paid a rate of R1380 per nite per room (this was the cheaper weekend rate offered by the hotel as we stayed on a Fri and Sat).
Perhaps it was because we had come from Cape Town earlier that I felt that our experience at the Radisson Waterfront in Cape Town was such a stark contrast to our stay here (see my review on Radisson SAS Waterfront).
When we arrived in Johannesburg, I was surprised that our driver drove us past another Intercontinental Sandton Sun & Towers and turned into another hotel nearby, which also appeared to be the Intercontinental Sandton Sun & Towers! The entrance was quite small as part of it was boarded up for renovation work, another area near the hotel lifts was also boarded up. Anyway, we went to the reception desk to check in and this was a challenge, with the drilling and knocking sounds in the background!
For some strange reason, the hotel had me booked for 3 rooms, when I had only booked two. That was sorted out when I showed them my booking printout which I had brought with me. I had also arranged for payment to be wired to the hotel prior to our arrival. Unfortunately the hotel had no record of this and unfortunately I did not bring proof of payment. They allowed us to go to our rooms but I had to leave a credit card imprint with them and they asked me to get the proof of payment faxed to them. Things were settled about an hour later when I managed to get my contacts to fax the proof of payment over to them.
So my first impression was that the hotel did not have its act together – getting the number of rooms wrong, not recording payment in their system when they had indeed been paid. Surely these are common issues they have to deal with for their guests!
The hotel is designed around an atrium and bubble lifts take you up to your rooms. Lighting is a bit on the dim side and hotel décor is 80s style (dark red carpeting, dim, gold lights - unlike your modern hotels with lots of natural light).
We stayed in an African Premium Room on the 12th floor. The room was a bit dark and smelt faintly of cigarette smoke but décor was OK (not very African in décor but it was OK). The bathroom was very clean, had a tub and separate shower, twin sinks, two bathrobes and slippers. We looked out onto an open car park. The room had coffee/tea making facilities and wireless internet facilities but when we tried to access that, it did not work. We called the hotel staff who told us that internet access was provided by a third party provider so please call the third party provider directly! Shouldn’t the hotel staff have done that for us - instead of asking guests to call a local internet service provider directly? Good grief…
Anyway, we did call the local service provider and was told that the server was down (we did not get internet access until the second day of our stay). On our first night, we got a little note from the hotel to say that power would be shut off for a few hours after midnight due to renovation works or something. That did not bother us too much since we would be asleep. Not sure how often that happens or if it happens at other times.
We did not eat breakfast in the hotel as it was not included in our room rate. The hotel is adjoining the Sandton City Shopping Complex and there are loads of eateries there where you can get breakfast for a very decent price – one worth mentioning is Mugg and Bean which serves a great breakfast. Walnut Grove was OK - they do a cheap buffet breakfast but the standard of food is really only passable.
However, one major plus point for the hotel is its location - as it adjoins the Sandton City Complex which is a huge shopping mall, with bank branches, loads of eateries, supermarket, cineplex and covered access to Nelson Mandela Square with more restaurants, shops there. From the 6th floor of the hotel, there is a walkway to the Sandton City Complex so you don’t have to go outdoors to walk over. Actually, there are several walkways on the 6th storey which lead to the shopping complex – one which requires you to cut through the multi-storey car park of the shopping compex, and another which goes past the Business Centre of the hotel. The latter is a more pleasant walk.
On the 6th storey, there is also a gift shop (which sells touristy stuff at substantially higher prices than the touristy shops in Sandton City Complex which sell the same things), and quite usefully, a VAT redemption office, which had just opened the weekend we were there! This does not mean you can avoid having your goods inspected at the airport, you still have to get them inspected, but it means that once you go through immigration, you go to the “fast track” counter in the VAT redemption area rather than queue up with others. Only downside is the computer is v slow as they dial into the hotel computer system so in the end, we spent as much time as others in the slower queue.
We tried passing some postcards to the concierge for mailing for us and he said that we would need to put stamps on them first. This was one of the many differences from our Radisson Cape Town experience, where the hotel took our postcards without any fuss. Obviously, we were charged the cost of postage but the point was that the hotel was willing to help us get them stamped.
Another problem is the confusingly similar name of this hotel, with the other Intercontinental just across the road. I think to locals, they refer to our block as the Sandton Sun and the other (more expensive one) is the Towers block. But both appear to carry the Intercontinental Sandton Sun name and to the uninitiated, you would not have known the difference, which would make arrangements to meet people a bit problematic, if you ended up waiting in different lobbies, which is what happened to us! In the end, we made reference to the “Vilamoura Restaurant” which is right next to the entrance of our hotel lobby, to help distinguish which hotel we were in!
