Karafuu Beach Resort & Spa

Need to keep reminding to bring water and new towels to the room.

We stayed at the Karafuu Beach Hotel for five nights. Let’s start with the positives: beautiful views and lovely white sand beach on the doorstep. Nice cocktails. Food is fine for buffet-style with fresh grill and pasta options for dinner. Bed is v comfortable. Gym facilities (machines and equipment) are good. The spa treatments are lovely - would highly recommend and the ladies who work there are excellent. Definitely kid-friendly: volleyball, pool activities etc led by the entertaining Animation Team who also put on evening entertainment - which was great. The less positives? We should have been tipped off when we arrived, and were given a welcome mango juice where it was made clear: “This welcome juice is complimentary.” It would be the last thing that was. You can’t drink the tap water in Tanzania or Zanzibar, so in all the previous hotels we had stayed in bottled water was provided free of charge. Not here! One 1L bottle per day (if housekeeping remembered to change it - 2/5 nights they did not…) and if not on the all-inclusive package then additional is $3 a bottle. It’s 30°C - we drank a lot of water! They also did not regularly provide water in the gym. There is nowhere in the bathroom to hang your towel up to dry. Fine if you are happy to have it changed every day and only use it once - if not, slightly irritating. Breakfast is plagued by bees - we had to regularly move tables or sacrifice a plate of syrupy pancakes to try and get them to leave us alone. We expected there would be guys selling us stuff on the beach - we didn’t expect they would also be patrolling round the pool and internal sunbeds trying to sign you up to snorkelling or scuba while you are trying to relax. Honestly at certain points this felt like harassment. One of our party dropped their glass bottle in the bathroom and it took more than an hour for housekeeping to come and clear it up. When my husband forget our key in the room (yes, they will only provide one) he had to wait outside in the sun for over 30 mins before someone came by (at first without a key) to let him back in. Of course people are busy and we understand that someone can’t just rush to our aid immediately. But for a five star luxury hotel you would hope for better service and expect more thoughtful design! We would not stay here again unfortunately, although we would love to return to Zanzibar.

We really enjoyed the hotel! It is clean and beautiful. The service was really good and the rooms are spacious. Good breakfast. We were a family of 12 people and they moved us to a family room until the night flight back, so we could still enjoy the day - free of charge!