Hotel Arrecife de Coral

The pros: clean , nice grounds and well located hotel in San Cristobal de las Casas. I found the room spacious - it even had 2 beds - so confused by another review posted about small rooms. I did find the beds to be 'extra firm' ... pretty much across the board in Mexico in general. Breakfast was nice EXCEPT ... this is the con ... seriously the worst coffee I've ever had! This was the general consensus of people I was with and general comments. This was surprising as we are in Chiapas ... known for it's coffee! People often walked several blocks into the town to get the 'good stuff'. The other con was most distressing. The supervisor (a middle aged woman with short tight curly hair) was absolutely atrocious to the staff. Then, she corners and interupts guests to DEMAND tips, quite rudely. I seriously doubt the actual staff get the tips based on her behavior.

It pretends to be a 4 star hotel, “proudly” displaying the 4 stars at the front of the hotel. It is no better than a 2 star hotel. The rooms are small and I have never seen a smaller bathroom especially the hand basin. There is no where to put your wet pack or other toiletries and no hooks. For 2 persons they give you a small sachet of liquid shampoo. In this day and age of reducing single use items came as a shock. There is a shower but no bath tub.in the room itself there is no furniture apart from the bed. No table or chair. The beds were rather hard. There is no fan or air conditioning but given it is rather cold they did have extra blankets. The walls of the room were just whitewashed with no artwork, photos or any other features. The TV is only in Spanish, at least we could not find an English Channel. There are very few electrical outlets so charging your devices was a painful process. Of course it seems Mexicans don’t drink tea or coffee as there are no tea or coffee making facilities or cups or saucers. I asked for a kettle and they said they did not have any. For a 2 storey building there is no lift and one has to lug ones own suitcases or pay the bell boy to do so. We are not used to tipping for such services. The breakfast was pretty ordinary and the waiters could not explain what the hot meals were, so we left it. There is a sort of water feature in the middle of the courtyard but no swimming pool. How on earth they can call themselves a 4 star hotel is a mystery. Overall I will rate this as a 2 star hotel at best.