Royale Bintang The Curve

So another one of my sporadic hotel reviews.

My family and I recently stayed at the Royale Bintang at The Curve. It's connected to the shopping center and is just opposite Ikano and Ikea. It's a four-star hotel, looks really nice...except for this super random fake life-sized camel at the entrance.

Great, right?

Not.

Check in time is at 2pm. We arrived in KL a bit early so we decided to go elsewhere first before checking in. At 2.15pm I get a call from the hotel asking when we're arriving because it's already past check in time. I assure them we're on the way - we're just running a little late and are a little lost.

We arrive at about 2.30 and I hurry over to the reception desk. And I'm told my room is not ready. WTF? Okay nevermind....she gives me a voucher for a welcome drink. We sit and have our drinks...in a leisurely manner, mind you. And it's about another 15-20 minutes before I go and check on the status of the room again.

They tell me that it's still not ready and will probably be yet another half hour. They can't locate the previous tenants of the room who still haven't checked out.

15 minutes later, they said it would be another 20 minutes.

WTF.

One of them tells us the latest check out they can give us as compensation is 1.30pm. She's the most junior staff amongst them, I think. The next guy says guests can have checkout as late as 4pm or 6pm. And the manager says it's typical for them to allow guests late check out for free. They obviously haven't gotten their stories straight. Until now, I still don't know which one of them is accurate.

Anyway by the time we check in it's past 3pm. We've asked them to compensate us for the super long delay by allowing us a late check out. Which the manager agrees to and claims he's set our key cards to allow for a 2pm check out.

So we go about our business and the next day we have lunch and come back at 1.30. And our key cards don't work. Luckily housekeeping is somewhere down the corridor and see us and open the door for us.

All in all they were just hopeless. Service was poor and they basically promised things and did not deliver. And then took an apathetic attitude to things when we complained.