Beautiful grounds, decent price, but tired rooms and shambolic front desk admin.
The Sofitel probably has the best grounds of any hotel in Manila. They are very well kept along the bay with a large swimming pool to complement. However, the rooms are the exact opposite with a tired design that matches the shoddy hotel exterior. The front desk is poorly trained with managers not understanding the offers presented on their website or clear communication on how charges are applied and handled.
If you are coming to the Sofitel from the airport, you can expect a fairly speedy trip thanks to the Airport expressway. You can make the journey in about 10 minutes with no traffic and perhaps 30 or so minutes with heavy traffic.
As mentioned in the opening paragraph, the hotel grounds are likely the best of any hotel in Manila. Not only are they of large size, but they are well kept and hug the shoreline of the bay so that you are looking out onto the water almost anywhere you sit and relax. Unfortunately, the hotel exterior itself is the exact opposite and looks in dire need of a repaint. The interior of the hotel reception is nice enough with the grand entrance overlooking the Spirals buffet, which is one of (if not) the largest buffet selection in Manila.
Check-in was a bit of a pain, I had pre-booked and pre-paid for two rooms, one of which included a bed for a child. Not usually traveling with children, I made sure to triple check the website when the booking was made to ensure that a two single bedroom would be adequate, with the site quite clearly stating that a roll-out bed would be provided free of charge. Upon check-in, I was told that there would be an additional charge for this bed, of which I then asked to speak with a manager.
After a 5 minute, or so, wait, the manager came and quite frankly spoke to me like I was an idiot. I pointed out that the website quite clearly states that the room provides a child bed for free and in fact even goes far as to say that a room of two single beds will fit two adults and two children, to which she stated that it does if an adult and a child each share a single bed.
It is bizarre to me that anyone would think that it would be acceptable to promote a room like that without any sort of outline that the bed-sharing is what is expected. She then decided to “help us out” by honouring the text on the website after I had managed to pull up the T&C’s on my phone showing her in black and white what it said, with her making sure to remind us again “That it is wrong, and I’ll speak with the managers to get it changed”. It wouldn’t even have been a big issue if she hadn’t acted as I’d just asked for a free room and was causing her personal issues and expense.
Anyway, we got checked into the two rooms, but this wouldn’t be the only time we’d need to deal with communication issues regarding the front desk.
The rooms themselves were pretty much fine, clean enough with a decent size bed. The only thing that I would say is that they are also tired, the décor is tired, the sockets/outlets are a little wonky, there is no socket/outlet on one side of the bed, the shower is powerless. It all just feels that it is about 10 years old and this is AFTER the renovation that they had a few years back. I suppose you can’t ask for too much though, because the price is fairly reasonable and nothing in the room warranted complaining about.
The hotel effectively has two restaurants with a further bar/restaurant in the pool area. This pool bar was being renovated, so we weren’t able to try it on this visit. But a couple of years back, we ate there, it was fine, exactly what you’d expect from a hotel pool bar.
The Spirals buffet is huge, a little expensive too at 3,500 PHP per head but a great selection from around the world and worth trying.
My favourite bar in the hotel is Snaps, which is a pretty classic American style sports bar. The décor here is really nice, comfy chairs, lots of wood, nice carpets, etc. The food is decent too, nothing special outside of burgers and such that you’d expect in a sports bar — but decent nonetheless. The sports bar also opens up into the Pagcor slot machine casino, which never really gets very busy, but is good for a few pesos if you are bored.
I repeated the word sports bar a couple of times above because you would very well expect a sports bar to show the most-watched league from the most-watched sport in the world. I am of course talking about Football/Soccer, which in the Philippines is shown on the Bein Sports channel. This sports bar does NOT show the most-watched league in the world because their “cable provider does not offer the channel”. That would be somewhat acceptable, but it has been this way for about THREE YEARS! How on earth has a sports bar in a multi-million-peso hotel not managed to work out how to get a channel that shows soccer? I totally get that Basketball is the sport in the Philippines, but you really would expect the managers to sort out showing international sports in an international hotel. Even whilst I was there, I saw no less than three people ask about it.
Check-out itself was quick — a little too quick. I checked out and was told that my credit card was not needed as the bill had been settled. I assumed that this meant our charges came under the 15,000 PHP deposit or so that I had been asked to give, and they’d just refund the difference. I should have asked for a receipt to double-check, but I did not, only to receive an email later on to Inform me they were taking a 32,000 PHP charge for the unpaid bill. That is fine, we ate a little more than I thought. But something didn’t add up and this was the start of my aggravation with the admin of the front desk. I’ve never had anything like this before and I had no reply from the email within 24 hours after asking about the charges which then meant I needed to make a phone call… a 50-minute call!
I’ll save you the details, but it turns out that they only emailed me ONE of the receipts from the rooms, so when I kept repeatedly and slowly asking for them to explain an additional charge, they couldn’t make the maths add up. Why on earth would you just send one receipt and basically say “We are charging you almost double what is shown here” with no explanation as to why that is the case? It just felt to me that no one on the front desk has any real experience in handling these procedures properly, as mentioned I have never had anything like this at all in any other hotel I have ever stayed at and that all it would have taken to sort it out would be 2 minutes to double-check the information was included.
In closing, the Sofitel is a decent enough hotel if you don’t really expect too much — and it is priced accordingly for that. There are so many things that are nearly right but not quite there that it just gets a little frustrating. I’d probably go back with kids (but be wary of the hidden fee they try to apply despite the website saying otherwise) due to the large swimming area, but as a couple/ business/ friends visiting the Pasay area of Manila, it is probably better to spend time at any of the newer hotel-casinos closer to the airport.