Hotel Elephant Park - Most Elephant Bathing View Rooms in Pinnawala

The staff were friendly and nothing was a problem, the hotel is in a great location you can see the elephants from your room, dining room or pool area when bathing in the river, they also walk past the hotel to and from the river.

No towels in the room but I'm sure you could ask and they would get you some.

Location in front of river where elephants bathe is fantastic

Do not allow smoking in restaurant. This is unacceptable for tourists in or near an eating area. We would have bought lunch at the restaurant but there were people smoking

Great view, quiet room, good breakfast, high shower.

Stairs are dodgy for an old guy, without handrails.

The rooms, whilst quite dated and tired, were clean and functional with lovely view. Breakfast was decent.

There’s were several things I didn’t enjoy about the property, but the main things would be the reception staff and tour coordinator. We travelled on a public holiday, and unbeknown to us, this meant that the elephants would not be coming down at the usual times, and were in fact only making a 20 minute appearance at 2pm. This was not communicated by the hotel. It was fortunate that we arrived at 1pm, rather than the designated check in time of 4pm, as if that had been the case we would have seen no elephants at all. I also felt that the advertising is misleading. The elephants are not there all day, and are elephants brought down from the local orphanage to essentially parade for the public. Some are chained. It doesn’t feel like humane or ethical tourism and I was uncomfortable with the whole thing. In addition to this, mahouts come down to the area to try and get tourists to pay to touch their elephant and have their picture taken with them. The elephants didn’t look healthy and were being prodded with a pointy stick. Furthermore, I was disappointed with the approach to customer service. When we arrived, we were shown to a clinical, glass walled room as we were early. This is despite the fact that the hotel had contacted me the day before to confirm my arrival time so that they could “have the room ready for me”. If I hadn’t complained, I think they’d have left us there (an hour later, a family who arrived at the same time as us were still sat in there). The tour manager was also very pushy and determined to take us to an unspecified location to feed, wash, kiss (?!) and generally pose with elephants. I sought clarification on where this was as I was not willing to support unethical elephant sanctuaries. He would not confirm, but when pushed acknowledged that some elephants would be chained and that they were ‘pets’. I refused his offer.