Talay Hotel and Villa

My wife and I booked and paid for 7x nights here at the Talay Hotel & Villa. We had paid for one of the deluxe villas. We are regular visitors to Cha-am and noted that this resort was close to the beach. I had booked 7x nights because I noted their advertising that they had free WiFi and internet available which would enable me to do some work whilst away from Bangkok. Unfortunately the WiFi / internet offer is not valid as the coverage & signal were poor and both the internet and power supply to the room were intermittent during our stay. We spoke to front desk on 3x occasions regarding this and were basically told that it was known the WiFi was no good and there wasn’t much they could do. On the third occasion of speaking to staff we asked for a refund of 2x nights so we could leave early and return to Bangkok as we had work commitments which we could not service through the WiFi / internet issues. We were told there was a NO REFUND policy and the Hotel Manager would not discuss the matter, instead leaving their staff to deal with the mess. I spoke to two other guests at the hotel who were also having WiFi issues at the hotel. For the poor facilities / service and also for the lack of management ownership I would not return here.

We arrived on the 10th July 2022. We checked into our fourth floor Seaview room in the early evening and went out for our evening meal, when we returned and unpacked we noticed how small the room was, certainly smaller than our bedroom at home, but we did have a Seaview. The bed was certainly less than 183cm, I'm 188cm so my legs hung over the end of the bed, my Partner was ok though. The aircon was working, but about 4.30am there was a loud bang outside of the room and the aircon stopped working. The only way you can contact reception is to walk there or use your mobile phone, it was cool so I decided to report this later, which I did. The Engineer from an outside company arriver later in the day and decided this may take some days to repair. The Manager on duty decided we could not change our room, so I asked for a refund which was denied. Then it was decided that we had to use our room during the day, but sleep in another room that had working aircon at night, the first room was on the third floor, we used that for two nights then transferred to the room opposite our on the fourth floor, which had been empty all the time we where there. Different Manager could see the problems we were having walking between rooms on different floors and no help or assistance given carrying our luggage between rooms. Eventually the aircon in our room was repaired, took a team of three Engineers to complete the task and we moved back into our booked room. The Managers on duty when this incident occurred, two young men are in need of extensive customer relations training, you should not have to knock on the partition at reception to gain their attention, too busy looking at their mobile phones to deal with anyone. We wanted to rent a motorbike, reception quoted 500 baht a day, everywhere else 200 baht or less per day, so we rented elsewhere. We found that our motorbike had been moved during the night on one occasion, to a place where it blocked access to the kitchen entrance, one of the kitchen staff was very rude to my Partner, thinking we had placed the motorbike there.

The positive comments on our stay, the breakfast was really good and all but three of the Staff were excellent.

Large and clean rooms with good solid and fast WiFi. Lots of parking. The coffee shop sells some wicked speciality coffees and good prices. A rather quirky balcony, you have to step over a big step and the balcony is very narrow.