Vila Recife Hotel

Vila Recife is in a fantastic location in the old town and good value for money overall. I would say that this hotel is quite basic but generally clean and a decent place to stay.

There was a few inconveniences with our stay:

1. When coming to clean our room, my friends and I were having a nap so I decided to gather up our towels and ask housekeeping if we could skip the room being cleaned and just have clean towels. The housekeeping lady, after being told many times and even showing her the three of us there, would only provide 2 big towels ? Obviously we needed 3 big towels because there were three of us. It was a bit of an awkward conversation where we were going back and forth asking for a third towel to which she said ‘big towels finished ?’ - not sure about that. However the lady on the reception sorted this after I made a complaint.
2. Interesting smell on level 0 (pool level) … it was very unpleasant almost like a smell of drains.
3. The pool area was small (hard to get sunbed), no umbrellas for shade …. so I spent sometime on a broken sunbed. Please see attached photo haha!
4. Ladies reception toilets lock did not work - didn’t bother us but probably needs looking at.
5. There is no secure luggage room, only a luggage corridor which was fine in our experience.

Regardless of this, the breakfast was basic but good enough, and most importantly the hotel was clean. One annoying thing was the fact there was only one physical key as opposed to key cards.

I would stay here again if I needed a value for money hotel. The outside of the hotel looks quite nice and there is a nice courtyard at the front.

We booked this hotel as it was a fairly good price so we weren’t expecting anything amazing, but our stay was sadly disappointing and it was largely due to the lack of good service and hospitality. The rooms are basic but functional, exactly what we thought it would be so no major complaints other than balcony area is non existent. We brought our own kettle and when we asked for cups we were initially told we couldn’t have them in our room but they could offer paper cups. We hardly had any towels. We asked for fresh towels and were told that we would have to wait another 2 days. We did eventually get some cups and fresh towels but the staff could have been more accommodating and friendly. We also asked for our room to be cleaned and left the sign on the door but it didn’t get cleaned. We witnessed people being turned away at breakfast because they arrived at exactly 10.30am and another couple were turned away because they didn’t have their room number yet and had only just arrived. There was nothing going on on the rooftop area, which is a shame as it could be a really good space. It just felt like the staff didn’t really want to do anything for you and everything we asked for felt like hard work. And I don’t think we were asking for anything unreasonable.

Overall as a hotel that is basic it costs nothing to offer a good service with a smile and friendly attitude, which we didn’t receive during our stay. Although upon checking out, we did meet a lovely and friendly receptionist who worked the night shift, I think his name is Ayu. He helped with our bags, and had a smile on his face. He also recommended a place to watch the sunrise. This hotel needs more staff like him!