My not so pleasant visit to Jambuluwuk Oceano Seminyak

My not so pleasant visit to Jambuluwuk Oceano Seminyak

My wife were initially so impressed with the images I saw on Jambuluwuk Oceano Seminyak that my wife and I decided to book the hotel for a week.

When we reached the hotel room, we were very unpleasantly surprised to see :

1) Very old wooden furniture that smelled of stale old wood. The strange smell lingered throughout the room and it reminded me of one of those 1970s homes

2) The toilet cleanliness and design looked like it was last renovated many decades ago, like during the 1950s to 1970s

3) Only the bedroom component was renovated, but even then the side tables were super old and emenating a stale smell. Be that as it may, the true test of a 4 to 5 star hotel is in the toilets and Jambuluwuk Oceano Seminyak's toilets are far from appealing as you can see from the pictures below.

4) What you see in the news reviews are merely renderings, especially the lobby. The reality is not so pretty.

5) We could only come to one conclusion that those who gave it good ratings probably have low standards, with all due respect.

We checked into the room for a mere 5 minutes, spent 1 minute staring at the room in shock, then spent another 5 minutes looking for another hotel and checked out Jambuluwuk Oceano Seminyak within10 minutes after our arrival. The hotel refused to give us a refund and chose to upgrade us to another room. We saw the "upgraded" room and while the toilet design was different (colors were different, instead of our current green ceramic 1950s wall tiles, it is now red ceramic 1950s wall tiles) the overall style, "oldness" and tiredness of the toilet was exactly the same.

While we lost quite a large amount of money because the hotel refused a refund, even though I was reasonable and suggested they keep half of it and can rent out the room I paid for to other guests, it was worth losing the money because I would never consider staying in a hotel with toilets such as this for 1 minute. We checked into Alila after that and the difference was amazing.

The GM is quite okay, Ni Kadek. However, she says that it is Jambuluwuk Oceano Seminyak's sales and marketing team that are the ones who are very aggressive about not issuing refunds. She suggested that it is the hotel's policy to put revenue and sales ahead of customer satisfaction. Not surprising, they probably hardly renovated the toilets since the 1950s to 1970s and only renovated the bedroom area jus to save a couple of bucks and mislead potential tourists with a nice view of the bedroom (likely also a computer rendering). A couple of hundred dollars is way more important to the Jambuluwuk Oceano Seminyak sales and marketing team than their reputation, so it seems.

I would never stay or recommend this place to anyone. The pictures below speak volumes.