Agulhas House

Was not impressed with the place because it turned out to be below the standard advertised ie. it says they have ds tv in the rooms but that's not true,self catering but not even a micro wave in the rooms too warm food up.On Saturday night about 8pm the lights just went off so as guests we were stuck in our rooms with no electricity for the whole night yet we had paid for that service but was denied it only to get it back on Sunday morning,electricity came back but we were denied another service ie. water,there was no water on Sunday yet we had to take a bath in order to check out yet when we queried about that we were told that there's nothing they can do about of which I find highly disappointing because the onus should be on management to ensure that things like that should not happen,what's worse is we didn't even get an apology or explanation of which I think that's the very least they could hv done or let alone some kind of compensation/re-imbursement as we had paid to stay there so we expect and deserve to get quality service of which was not given to us at all,might as well stay at home if that's the kind of service that they provide,I would not recommend this place to anyone after our experience,we had planned to go back there after this weekend because of what we expected the place to be like when we initially booked for this weekend but after our experience we changed our minds.

Establishment's response

We do have DSTV - not all the channels- but SABC TV 1,2,3 Mnet and ETV. in all the rooms.

We have never said we are self catering. We are a guest house/B&B and specifically advise that we are not self catering if there are enquiries in this regard.

There was a power failure on Saturday night for which we apologise. I was on the property and had I been advised of the power failure in the section the guests were in - which took place during an enormous storm - I could have rectified the problem. There were other guests in residence as well who understood the problems encountered with storms and did not find it necessary to complain about circumstances beyond our control.

The entire village was without water from about 07.00 on Sunday morning until after lunch - which was the case with Telkom lines - so the entire guest house was without water which was beyond our control.

I question how we are supposed to deal with an event of nature.

I apologised to the client saying that they were unfortunately circumstances beyond our control when he came to query the lack of water at 09.45 on Sunday morning.

Furthermore, our breakfast finishes at 10.30 yet on Saturday we happily provided breakfast service at after 11.00 for them.

On Sunday the client came to me at 09.45 about having no water when I apologised and told him that the village had no water. I asked him then when they wanted breakfast to which he said he would let me know - which he never did - and we cleared the breakfast service at 11.30.

At this time, I advised check out time was 10.00. I was asked to extend the time to 11.00 which I agreed to. However, at 13.15 I found it necessary to go to the clients room and request them to vacate.

There was neither thanks for allowing them to stay for the extra 3 plus hours nor an apology for their late departure and the room was left in a shocking state.

There are always two sides to every story and as a result of their general attitude we had decided that we would not take the tentative booking made.

The client had already made us unhappy by trying to circumvent SarafiNow and book direct with us which I refused to allow him to do.

We are not in the habit of getting bad reviews but we, unfortunately, cannot cope with problems that Mother Nature presents and unreasonable expectations from difficult guests who have no concept regarding remedying problems which are out of our control.

A nice environment in a warm atmosphere. Very competent diving centre. Great value for money.