At Littleboboon, we travel around the world to review restaurants and hotels for our customers, readers and for our own pleasure.

One thing we notice is in the hotel industry -- particurlarly at the high-end so called "5-star" resorts -- that not all 5-stars resorts are equal. For instance, let's have a closer look at the Anantara resorts in Thailand which belong to the Minor group.

We chose Anantara resorts in Thailand to spend our Christmas and New Year holidays with family and friends. We stayed at Anantara Bangkok Riverside from December 23rd 2017 to December 27th 2017, then Anantara Chiang Mai from December 30th to January 2nd 2018, and finally Anantara Bophut from January 2nd to January 6th 2018.

The Anantara Bangkok Riverside and Anantara Chiang Mai were true 5-star resorts, both were very well located and beautifully built  with great services. Our rooms were nice, clean and superbly designed, especially at Anantara Chiang Mai. Each resort has it own identity and personality, with great breakfast buffet, restaurants and bars.

Our New Year's eve party with the Phantom of Opera theme at the Anantara Chiang Mai was one of the highlights of our trip to Thailand.

Then came our last stay at the Anantara Bophut.  It was a disaster in every sense, from our arrival to our last day.

On arrival, we had to wait 40 minutes in the library  before we could check into our rooms.  In the four rooms that we occupied, each room had an issue: in one room, the television was not working, in the others the bathroom had not been cleaned properly, the telephone was not working, the air conditoning was extremely noisy and one headbed lamp was missing.

The breakfast buffet was very poor compared to Anantara Bangkok or Anantara Chiang Mai.
One early morning, a call from reception woke us up at 6:20am just to check if there was no fire in our room!  Apparently their fire alarm was not working properly.

The last issue was for our last day: we had ordered a minivan to go to a restaurant outside the resort. Reception told us that a minivan was on the way only to inform us 15 minutes later that there was no minivan available for our group. When we asked them to order two taxis as there were eight of us, only one was available. Visibly even a simple request they were not able to manage properly.

That's exactly where the problem laid: in our humble opinion, Anantara Bophut is poorly managed, plus the resort looks quite old and run down, the team lacked training and certainly did not show a client-oriented attitude and sense of service that a 5-star resort demand.

It was clear to us that we would not recommend Anantara Bophut to our customers and readers.

https://bangkok-riverside.anantara.com

https://chiang-mai.anantara.com

https://samui.anantara.com