Park Hyatt Zanzibar (the only Park Hyatt in Africa) had its grand opening on March 8th and allowed bookings on Hyatt.com starting March 12, 2015.
As I was going to be in the Zanzibar island on its opening week, I decided to squeeze in a stay on the opening night on March 12. The hotel had brought up the opening date from March 30th to March 12th. The hotel was not originally accepting reservation for the dates that I was going to be in Zanzibar.
You can access Park Hyatt Zanzibar’s website here.
Location
Park Hyatt Zanzibar is located on the Zanzibar island within a short flight from Dar es Salaam or less than two hours by a ferry. There are some international flights out from Zanzibar mainly to Nairobi. Condor and Meridiana operate charter flights.
The hotel is located in the Stone Town and roughly 800 to 900 meters from the Dar es Salaam ferry port.
Check-in
The hotel had four people checking in on 12th and I stopped by a front desk on 11th when I had a dinner at the hotel to let them know that I would be coming around 10AM from the nearby DoubleTree hotel. Park Hyatt had sent a bellboy that was waiting me at the DoubleTree when checking out.
The hotel had upgraded me to a Park Suite on the new building. The old section only has two suites; one Park Suite and the Zanzibar suites. All the other 65 rooms and suites are in the new building.
Park Suite 3311
As most of the rooms are not in the same building where the check in takes place, it is a short walk and few doors to get to the lift lobby.
The Park Suite was spacious and had proper living and bed rooms both with balconies.
The closet space was bit tight and the luggage rack was in the corner of the room besides the bathroom. The bed had mosquito nets around it, although I didn’t any at the Park Hyatt.
You could have a look at the harbor on the right side by zooming a bit.
Pool
There is a pool with sunbeds, as the beach around the hotel is not good.
Fitness Center
The fitness center had modern Life Fitness machines
Around The Hotels
Hotel has a library room with plenty of space down to read or do some reading on your pad.
It also has a wonderful looking small courtyard.
Food & Beverage
It is difficult to ear late in Zanzibar and DoubleTree suggested some local place at 10PM when I felt like having couple of drinks and a bite. Good that I decided to walk 200 to 300 meters to the Par Hyatt to check if any outlets there were still open.
There were quite a few people at the restaurant at the hour and maybe a table or two at the bar.
I had mojito (well done), caipirinha (so so) and asked for a bottle of water that turned out to be Voss from Norway.
The mezze plate that I had as an appetizer was what one would expect (difficult to screw up).
But the spicy snapper that I had was missing any spices and quite frankly I didn’t like it at all. According to the waiter, the fish was bake.
Breakfast selection could have been better and the two eggs sunny side up that I ordered “raining” didn’t quite come right.
Check-out
If you card has a chip and PIN attached to it, try to remember it. In most of the countries you can bypass the PIN by just pressing the enter and you then have to sign the receipt. This doesn’t work in Tanzania. The only way to bypass the PIN is for the front desk to manually punch in the card numbers.
When I was eating in the restaurant and not checked in to the hotel, the manager who rung me up knew how to do this. At the time of checking out, they didn’t. My credit card number was recorded to the system and they told me that they would process the charge later. My stay hasn’t posted to the Gold Passport account and the charge hasn’t hit the credit card used yet.
Also, the points for the Food & Beverage spend on the 11th hasn’t hit to my account either. In all fairness, the hotel is not yet included in the list of hotels where spent outside of your stay is eligible for the points, although their sister property in Dar es Salaam is.
Conclusion
There were few hick ups during the stay, but surprisingly low number considering that I was there on the first date they were accepting guests on direct Hyatt.com bookings.
The only problem that I can see is that there really isn’t that much to do in around the Stone Town in Zanzibar. Most of the tourists that come to the island may spend a night or two (max) inside the Stone Town and rest of the time at one of the beach resorts. Not sure how much repeat business they will get.
The hotel was beautiful and I really liked the architecture especially that of the old building. The courtyard there was beautiful. If I ever go back to this hotel, I certainly would like to stay at one of the two suites that are located in the historic building to see how they are done.
You sometimes have internet “issues” in Zanzibar, but the internet access worked without ANY issues at this hotel (you can get work done).
