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Manathai Samui Resort (Buddy Oriental Samui Beach Resort)
173/24 Robkoh Road, Maret
Lamai, Koh Samui, Suratthani 84310, Thailand
Tel. +66(0)77 458 560
Fax. +66(0)77 458 555
Homepage
Visited by Major Grubert
 The „Manathay Resort“ hotel is actually called (I found it a bit confusing at first) “Buddy Ocean Oriental Hotel”, which means that the name will be changed soon. At the moment the new name is not on the hotel but can be found on the Agoda website.
The hotel really is nice and spacious. Very friendly personnel. Booked (Agoda) a room for a little more than 50€/night for the smallest room (first row of pics) including breakfast (good). I could have got the Junior Suite for an extra 10€. I was annoyed with myself for not booking it, was probably a lot larger than my room, which was still large enough though. The furnishing is old English style; the flooring is old style planking, all thick wood. Large safe, small fridge, which I cleared out to enable me to put my own stuff from the supermarket in the next day. There are two pools, a small nice one, which I can see from my second floor room and a larger one closer to the sea. The hotel building itself is on the side away from the sea meaning one has to cross the road to get to the pool next to the sea. There are a couple of security men with whistles who stop the traffic if one wishes to cross the road.
The hotel room is nice and good too, but does have two decisive drawbacks. The first one is that the internet connection either doesn’t work or is very slow. The second one is when during the night everything is quiet; I can hear a generator running in the distance; it oscillates. It sounds a little like a lawnmower being used in the distance. After breakfast I let the personnel at the reception know that I want to move rooms because it wasn’t on that I can’t sleep because of such a noise. I tried to find out exactly where the noise came from, it seems that it comes from the kitchen behind the small pool.
Changing my room was no problem at all. I asked what an upgrade to the Junior Suite would cost – 1000/day, I grab it.
So, I moved rooms within the hotel, I move to the Junior Suite (the last two rows of pictures). It’s fantastic, but the internet connection doesn’t work. The hotel IT expert messes about in the basement and replaces the router; after that the connection works without any problem at all.
The hotel isn’t really that central. The beach here at the beginning of the bay is stony and not all that good for swimming. If your solo or a “night owl” then you will defiantly need a (hireable) means of transport, either that or during the night your will have to pay 200 Baht for a taxi (one-way to close by Lamia, to Chaweng from 500), this all adds up and gets on one’s nerves with the Samui taxi mafia being outrageous. I recommend the Junior Suite, I would stop at the place again just because of the rooms; take a look at the pics.
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