For rural Ethiopia, Swayne's offers nice rooms & comfortable beds. The views from the clif are great. The hotel has been expanded and updated and the dining area has been nicely improved.

Great place, nice (seemed to be recently renovated) rooms, unbelievable view and the food at the restaurant is great!

Make sure you stay between rooms 4 and 20 to have the best view.

Price is a little steep (50 dollars for ferenjis), but worth it!

We were shown to the rooms, just near to the beautiful cliff view, the garden was beeing rebuilt and it was uncomfortable to walk the long way to the rooms. There were baboons in the garden, near the cliff, and we could spot birds too. Very quite and peaceful. The bed was a bit hard, the shower did work, but one needs to plug in the boiler at least one hour before getting hot water! The rooms seem old and not very well kept, but they were large and we could even charge our cameras and phones.

Swayne's wasn't our first choice, unfortunately the Paradise Lodge was all booked so we ended up at Swayne's for 3 nights while visiting the Arba Minch area. Swayne's has to be one of the worst places we've ever stayed in all our travels and that assessment does factor in the typical lodging quality of Ethiopia versus other places in the world. But even given that this place was a hole, cement block motel rooms grouped together in an unattractive landscape unless you had one of the few rooms with a valley view. The room was ok, no air conditioning but that was not an issue once things cooled off for the evening. The beds had good mosquito netting, I'll give it that. The bathroom was ok, and was fairly spacious. We were there during a drought and the hotel needed to conserve water and turned the water off during certain times of the day or night, that we completely understood and have no complaint about, you do what you have to do and did our best to conserve when water was turned on. Our first trip to the bar/restaurant we were served extremely warm beer, apparently the fridg they were keeping it in wasn't up to par but they served it anyway. We did suggest they put some in the freezer for about 30 minutes which they did. The food in the restaurant was aweful, worst on all our journey through Ethiopia, many of our best meals were at the local restaurants, local food. Very good in Arba Minch is Soma Restaurant, great local fish, go there! Its not far from Swayne's. The staff were helpful and accommodating for the most part, no complaints there. This place was probably ok for anyone passing thru Arba Minch for 1 night but for 3 try to stay elsewhere.