I want to start by saying that we booked our stay with another hotel with a better standard through Agoda.com and got moved to Krabi La Playa Resort because Agoda trick people and purposely book customers in hotels they know are fully booked! So my review here is based on us expecting a higher standard hotel. Staff helped and treated us exceptionally well and the hotel is totally good for the standard it represents.

I have lived and worked in Thailand for over two years and this would be my 11th trip to my favourite country. Normally we stay at Ok hotels like Krabi La Playa Resort and it works great for us. But for this trip we had decided to spend a little more and stay at hotels with a little better standard. We spent weeks looking for hotels with great reviews, mainly here on Tripadvisor.com. Finally we decided to book a room at The Small, Krabi for 6 nights. For our booking we used Agoda for the first time, as they had rooms available. Or so we thought! We booked, payed and got a confirmation on the room from Agoda. On the morning of our trip I had a feeling I should call and check our reservation with the hotel directly. Doing so I was informed that they did indeed have my booking from Agoda but that they were fully booked, which they had informed Agoda about. So we had been moved to their sister hotel Krabi La Playa Resort without any notice! I immediately called Agoda and asked what was going on. I also told them I had payed for a better standard hotel and expected compensation as we were about to leave for the airport and I had no time to cancel the booking and start to look for a new hotel! I was then told that they could do nothing about it, but I could get a 10% discount on my NEXT booking!!! WTF!?!?!? I told them I have absolutely no use of a discount later on as I will never again use their service after being treated like that!

As I'm not one to take s**t like this I decided to look into this some more after arriving in Thailand. So I asked the staff at all four hotels we stayed at, one hotel owner I know in Phuket and also a Thai friend who is a former employee of Agoda.com. They all said basically the same thing:

Agoda do not check immediately if the hotel has rooms available or not. And they keep booking customers into hotels even after being told there are no rooms available with the words "You can't say you are full because people will stop booking!"

I was also told they had no problems with Booking.com, Hotels2thailand.com, Hoteltravel.com and most others. I have used a couple of others myself and everything worked great before. Also, on Agoda you can't select the number of children travelling with you and so you need to check if it is Ok with kids AFTER you have payed them and after they have checked with the hotel. You might need to pay extra when arriving at the hotel! My advice is to use any other site when booking your hotels.

So, arriving at The Small in Ao Nang we were told what we allready knew. I knew it was not the staff or the hotels fault so I explaind so and what had happened. The staff was super friendly and did everything they could to help us out. What they ended up doing was asking us if we would accept staying at Krabi La Playa for 3 nights and then move to the Small with a room upgrade and everything free of charge. Therefore we ended up staying at this hotel. The staff did not have to do this as they were not to blame for any of our problems, but they did so anyway!

If you have been to Thailand before you know that most speak some English but they can be hard to understand at imes. Mainly due to grammar and pronounciation difficulties and even at hotels of this standard. Being patient and doing your best to be friendly and helpful yourself will get you so much further. Being rude and complain about the smallest things will just annoy everyone and make your stay unpleasant. Also, everone should know that professional pictures from the hotels almost never tells the truth. They always look much nicer than the reality. This is directed to those who give unfair reviews because of small things that mostly can be worked out by being friendly, as Thai people are among the friendliest and nicest in the world.

Krabi La Playa Resort is a good hotel for the kind of standard it represents, which would be 3 stars by my guess. It is a few years old so some things might be a bit worn, but I found everything to be Ok. The rooms are good and clean. The beds are hard as they are in most places in Thailand. The location is good with just a few minutes walk to the shopping and restaurants. The pool area could have had a few more chairs but worked fine for our family. The service was, as I wrote earlier, great and the staff were very friendly. Breakfast was also of normal standard and deffinately served its purpose.

Ao Nang is much more relaxed compared to other places like Patong in Phuket. It should be noted that the Ao Nang beaches is not much to write about. You have to go to nearby beaches like Railey or Phra Nang (which is spectacular) by Long tail boats if you want get some really nice ones. It costs about 300 Baht and takes 10 minutes.

We spent two weeks at the Krabi la Player in January. When we arrived we were greeted with a nice drink while we had to fill out a couple of forms. We were taken to our room on the 4th Floor, which you get to by lifts.The room was gorgous, there was a nice elephant made out of a couple of towels on the bed. The bed was massive, my only thing I would say is the pillows were a bit lumpy for me, but thats personnel preference. The bathroom was amazing. It had a sink,shower and toilet and a bath which you could lay in and open the shutter doors and look out into the bedroom and watch television. The room was nice and spacoius with fridge, big wardrobes and drawers. It had 2 arm chairsaand table, televison and dvd player. The balcony was nice and big with 2 chairs and a table, we had views overlooking the pool which was lovely. The room was cleaned on a daily basis.

The location of the hotel we thought was perfect. You can get to the local shops either from the front of the hotel or go out the back by the spa rooms. The beach is 5-10minutes walk away. Or you could walk the strip where all the shops and restaurants are, or there are plenty of taxi cars or tuk tuks.

Breakfast was good, different to what we have had before. You have your eggs cooked for you as you like and there is a hot plate where you cook your own bacon. It had the usual cereals, salads, thai food, and breads.

The pool has a swim up bar and you can purchase snacks through out the day and have lunch or dinner. We only had breakfast in the hotel. We found a lovely restaurant outside the hotel called Tara restaurant,which is out of the spa entrance turn right and its on the right. We had lunches and dinners there. We also had a few lunches from the strret seller on the right hand side of the strip which were so so cheap and the food was great

We hired a moped for 4 days and it only cost £5 aday. We could just hop on and off we went. We hired a long tail boat to ourselves one morning and went to chicken island and did some snorkelling. You can tell what you want to do and they will take you where for half day or full day.

We will be going back to Krabi as it is such a beautiful part of Thailand and there is still lots for us to see, and we will be staying at the Krabi La Player again.
Any questions please email me: Dianebann8@aol.com

We stayed 7 nights in January and whilst we had a good time, given we payed $170Aud a night for a pool access room with jacuzzi that did not work, it's not entirely worth it. Room was spacious and comfortable. Decent sized bathroom, tv, DVD, coffee and tea making facilities, reasonablypriced mini bar and rooms well serviced. A few things that didn't meet expectation were the jacuzzi that didn't work, the in room safe (despite being fixed promptly) failed to work twice, on site massage very average with masseurs talking the whole way through. Breakfast was ok but nothing to rave about. Restaurant for lunch and dinner very quiet despite hotel being close to fully booked. other concern was sometimes the operator did not understand English. the great things we did like were the pools, ambience, size of room, overall great housekeeping and pool was cleaned thoroughly for several hours each and every morning. La playa has a convenient location and no need to venture far for good food, pharmacy, mini marts etc. We chose to eat at Palm Court at the Centara which is on Moo 3. take the walkway near the spa area and you'll find some good options there. Laundry also much cheaper at mini mart at 40baht per kilo as opposed to astronomical price at the La Playa. Also an ATM is conveniently located within 100 m outside the walkway when turning right.

We stayed for 3 nights in this hotel and everything about this hotel was just great!

1) Very close to the harbour if you've signed up for the island trips,
2) Walking distance to shops,
3) Plenty of varieties of Restaurants/Cafes to dine in,
4) Massages are excellent!
5) The pool side cafe serves very nice food and cocktails too.
6) Breakfast at the hotel serves quite a variety of food to choose from.

If you're lucky to get a room on the ground floor, you'd get to jump into the pool right off your balcony!