We are more than happy about the restaurant service. The cook makes perfect food. The waiters and waitresses are polite. We don't usually give tips but in this restaurant we felt like it. The room was ok, the shower sewer didn't work properly. This was a minor problem though.

The biggest, and almost the only problem was that we are still missing 200 USD. We had some cash in our back bags (hidden among dirty clothes) and somebody took 200 USD (we didn't count the shillings...). After we noticed it, we told the general manager about it. He promised to pay the ammount back. No police, it's only bad publicity to them. We believed. Nothing has happened within last 5 months... Ok, it was our own fault? In his words it has happened before too (once). Avoid this hotel.

A couple from Finland

Spent here a week, for business very good hotel in stone town level, the food is good but not in high standard.
The hotel building is old, so no elevator, we were in the top floor below the kitchen so noise at 7am just above our room woke us up...
The staff is very helpful and the room was cleaned twice a day.

The hotel is close to Serena and we had dinner at Serena. Staff at Al Johari were friendly and helpful. Bathroom was terrible as water leaked everywhere from shower, glad we only stayed one night. Also had two single blankets! Can hear noise from below(it was Eid so ppl were out and about) so if you dont mind walking up more stairs get a room on a higher floor.

My friend and I were in Dar es Salaam for 2 weeks on a volunteer project and decided to head to Zanzibar on our free weekend. We booked Al Johari at the very last minute and were happy with our choice.

While the hotel is slightly off the main part of Stone Town, the main parts of town are still accessible in ~5 minutes by foot.

The hotel itself was reasonably nice with a large double bed draped in a mosquito net (very important for Tanzania). The room and bathroom were both very clean and quite nice.

The restaurant/bar upstairs had free wi-fi that worked inconsistently. The bigger problem was that the bar area had a very bad ant problem. I could not put my drink down on the table without ants crawling all over and in my glass. This is the only thing that bumps the hotel down to 4 stars.