Protea Hotel by Marriott Dar es Salaam Oyster Bay in Dar es Salaam

There is no way that this hotel should be under the Marriott brand in any shape or form. It looks and feels and smells as though nothing has been invested in its fundamentals for the last 25 years at least. The general manager who tried to patch things up may or may not have decision-making power in budgeting and investments but everything here is done on the cheap. The pool is dirty. The bedding is old. The cleaning people mindlessly push mops around the floors but don’t pick up dead insects. More or less any of the food that was made with more than a couple of ingredients has cheap fillers in it. And the noise both within due to minimal sound insulation between rooms and without due to heavily trafficked area and once again no sound insulation is something that the website should be honest about the very least. And this doesn’t apparently stop them from charging 10 times cost price for a small bottle of soda water. This place has pretentions way beyond its reality.

I will acknowledge that the staff and manager did try fairly clumsily to make up for the shortcomings, by leaving a bottle of cheap red wine in my room, and giving me a ride to the airport when I finally lost patience since there was no longer any Wi-Fi because the place was saturated. But it was honestly a question of too little too late.

Old hard towels that used to be white . Lizards enter rooms and reception is rude when you ask for help . Bedding is old and worn out . Rooms just smell funny and are out dated . The pool area is the only nice part of that hotel . The rest needs to be refurbished.