Cycad Palm Diani

everything

The staff were very friendly and the area very clean.

It is a bit far from the beach

The place was as advertised, host was a pleasure to do business with, very friendly staff, relaxing pool to cool off during the day. The beach is just a 20min walk away, The rooms are old but they were clean. Make sure to bring your own water for drinking/cooking. Water pressure from the shower was very minimal which made showering a bit of a chore but still manageable. Cycad is a great budget option if you don’t need A/C and are okay being a bit further from the beach. The Host was very accommodating and will surely take care of you.

Your place is basically the whole house with small living room, kitchen and a bedroom. We did cook in a kitchen and had most of the utilities which was nice. Place also has a pool and it was super nice to swim there. Beach is 15-17 min by foot. The road to the hotel is not paved, so it was a bit hard to convince tuk-tuks to go there. Staff were very nice and smiley and even shared some salt and oil with us.

Hotel is outdated and unfortunately, there is no sign of it being updated anytime soon. Without maintenance, it can’t compete with big hotel in Diani and I wish it could. The most unpleasant thing for us were the windows, which didn’t have any mosquito nets and were opening in a weird way only partially. Unfortunately mosquito net over the bed didn’t help, so we almost didn’t sleep most of our nights. Hotel doesn’t provide small towels for hands or feet and soap. No small lamps for bedrooms and very strong white light. Another big issue for us was very unsafe heater for the shower. It’s not isolated and kept the tap keeps hitting you with a small shock. It’s very unsafe, so hope they can fix it. We were told to turn it on, wait and then take a shower. But the water was then boiling hot and in couple minutes cold again. We had to shower for 2 minutes when the water is bearable.