Orchid Eilat Hotel

What started as a horrible experience began with being given a room that reeked of cigarette smoke. Initially, the manager hid in her office and refused to come out. When I tried calling, she briefly answered, put me on hold for 15 minutes, and then vanished altogether. Hours later, a different manager finally addressed the issue, but attempted to pass off smaller, cheaper rooms as “upgrades.” It wasn’t until the next morning that a genuinely kind receptionist helped us secure a room that matched what we had originally paid for.

Horrible experience, Had bed bugs and got bitten all over. Worms and cockroaches in the rooms. We complained and the receptionist told us “well we are on a mountain and these things happen”….. Both of our replacement rooms were in the same state. We didn’t even get half off our stay.

The worst hotel experience of our lives. Extraordinarily disrespectful staff and dirty rooms with dust and animal feces.

This isn’t a 4 star hotel. Maybe 3 at best. The last time I was here was about 30 years ago and it is exactly the same as I remember it, which is to say the place clearly hasn’t been invested in or upgraded since. Stray cats absolutely everywhere, including sitting around reception and lounging on all the chairs at breakfast, really quite off putting especially if you don’t like cats. Rooms are fairly unappealing inside, lots of scuff marks everywhere and general wear and tear - and we had one of the more expensive lodges. The lodge we were in featured a vertiginous loft area for kids to sleep in that’s entirely unsafe for small children, given the almost vertical ladder you need to climb to get up there, surprised there haven’t been more accidents. Cleaning service is pretty appalling - we were there for a week and the sheets were not changed at all, despite requesting it multiple times. Baths are tiny and don’t have proper plugs, just a sort of disc that goes over the hole but doesn’t fully cover it, so it’s useless. Breakfast and dinner looks appealing as the buffet is wide ranging but the food was often greasy and under seasoned, and I couldn’t help but notice that people tended to stick their fingers into it to grab what they wanted when they were passing by. More seriously, the behaviour of the staff around the dining room was some of the worst I’ve encountered at any hotel, let alone one purporting to be a 4 star establishment. It goes beyond the slightly blunt Israeli style, and my large party, most of whom live in Israel, were quite appalled. This included shouting at one of our group for sitting waiting at a table at breakfast for the rest of us to arrive, no attempts to come up with solutions for our large party at dinner when we’d booked a table ahead of time and they’d clearly overbooked the hotel, rudeness when we’d booked a tuk tuk for a specific time and they’d got the time wrong, and so treated me like I had taken leave of my senses…the list goes on. This was partly due to the hotel clearly overbooking itself, and not having enough space to accommodate all guests for meals, which made most evenings very uncomfortable. One of the only members of staff I encountered who was brilliant was Alon, the very popular and charming omelette guy at breakfast who makes them to your specification.