I would recommend that no-one ever stay in the Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge unless they have to, and don't be fooled by its website!

I was in Arusha for 5 days for a conference - we stayed in the Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge only because that is where the conference was – it is not the kind of hotel I would normally choose. The Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge boasts of being a 5 star hotel with excellent service and 3 restaurants – this is a lie. The rooms are physically very nice (at least the cottages/bungalows are), spacious and nicely decorated in a smart rustic style. The pool is also nice and clean (but cold – Arusha is 1400m high!), but as the hotel is at the foot of Mount Meru (which at 4600m high is usually lost in cloud) the climate is cold and damp – we were there for a week and had rain for half the days. We never even came close to seeing Kilimanjaro. The actual main hotel building is rather ugly concrete.

The hotel claims to have three restaurants and a coffee shop – this is a total lie. The Cane restaurant upstairs was never open, the BBQ ranch does not exist, and the “coffee shop” is just some chairs – there is never any freshly brewed coffee as they claim. The main Kilimanjaro restaurant claims to have an alla-carte menu, but what ever you ask for, 5 minutes later you are told they can’t do it. You are never told at the start that they will not do any of these dishes – you have to waste time asking. In the end we discovered that the only dish they would do was frozen pizza! Instead you always have to have the buffet – very poor, tasteless, overcooked, bland western food, massively overpriced at $25 per person – for lunch and dinner. As the Lodge is 30 km from Arusha with no other places within walking distance, we were thoroughly fed up with the buffet option after a couple of days. The minibar is an empty fridge, the 18 hole golf course has only 9 holes, the masseur is not on site, the airport shuttle is fictional (taxi costs a non-negotiable $50 dollars as well for 15 km!), they do not change travelers cheques despite the nearest bank being kms away, the shop is pathetic and very overpriced, and the staff are at best cheerfully incompetent and at worst deceitful and rude. Apparently the hotel survives on conferences, so there is no desire to encourage repeat custom or any kind of individual service. I realise that many of the things mentioned above are not common in this part of the world, but the point is that this hotel claims to be and charges as if it is a 5 start hotel, but just doesn't deliver.

Then, the final straw, the conference was nearly halted because of the UN moving in for a conference, which resulted in 2/3 of the guests for our conference being thrown out. The Ngurdoto management promised to supply alternative lodging in their Impala sister-hotel, but this was also full, and many people were left with no accommodation until midnight, and many had to move to a different hotel each night. This event also involved a lot of disinformation by the hotel management: partly intentional and partly out of incompetence. As the Ngurdoto hotel is a regular venue for conferences including large international conferences, the mistakes they made and their treatment of guests was completely unacceptable. I would never recommend anyone to stay in this place.