Coconut Villa Resort & Spa

This is a nice hotel if you want a relaxing break to get away from it all, as its location is quite isolated. We booked this hotel because we were looking for a few days of relaxation in the middle of a hectic south east asia tour. We took a shock vacation rate for next to nothing (about £17/night room only) so we cannot complain. The private beach is slightly disappointing. Beautiful to look at but not good for swimming as it is very shallow and when the tide is out it becomes quite muddy, so I would say that if you are looking for a great beach, perhaps this is not the place, but if you are happy with a nice pool overlooking the beach, then it is fine. We took the hotel breakfast on the first night at a cost of about £7 pp, but we found the buffet very poor in choice. On the positive side, the hotel offers a free shuttle service to Chaweng Beach and the second most touristy resort (forgot the name), but these are not daily. It alternates the days to both resorts. We found the timings were very ackward, as it left about 4pm and returned 6pm, which gave us just about 1h30mins for a quick shopping spree. If you wanted to spend the day in the beach or stay for a meal after shopping, you would have to take a taxi for one of the journeys, which was about £10-£12 (not cheap for Thailand).

Although the hotel was quite new (Feb. or Mar. 2008) it already had spots on the walls and the mirror in the bathroom was rusty. We booked the beachfront bungalow with doors to our own terrace. But since these doors were not sealed in any way at top or bottom, it was always warm inside the room (although a/c was on) and since it was raining, all the water from the rain was inside our room on the floor and under the bed. It took the staff two hours, to think about sealing the doors from outside with towels, but by then, the room was already wet.
We often had the feeling of beeing supervised, when we went out of the hotel and other guests were also always asked where they are going and when they are coming back, if they were having dinner or lunch in the restaurant, what they bought when shopping and so on.
The stay at the hotel was ok, but I wouldn't stay there again, because the beach wasn't very nice, water comes into the room when it rains, the staff doesn't seem to understand the sign "privacy please" they come in and clean the room no matter what.
The hotel is defininitely not bad or a dump or something like that, i guess they just need a little more time to finish all the odds and ends that a new hotel has. Maybe in a year or two they will be a very well run hotel, but they still have some work to do!