Gamboa Rainforest Reserve

The staff was super friendly and during the day you can do several adventure trips with your family.

Maybe you can add more activities and playing areas for kids inside the hotel. Because if it rain, there is not too much to do with your kids.

I loved the layout of the hotel

No faults

Perfect location at Soberania national park. They know it and price accordingly. The hotel looks like a 90's style Disney World hotel. Beds, towels, shower are comfortable and big. The view from any floor is great and the pool is superb. This is the best place to start your Pipeline trail and Plantation trail hikes, which you need to do at or before sunrise (6 am) to see the animals. After 9 am most of the animals will be gone. Skip the buffet breakfast as it only starts at 7 am. Buy food at the Gamboa local store & restaurant (for a fraction of the Resort price). They also cater to many city tour operators and serve lunch and dinner up to 6 pm. If you're someone who prefers buffet breakfast before doing anything else, you're the perfect target for the many short tours that the hotel offers for activity-challenged persons with deep pockets. You can spot animals (even the crocs are fed to stay nearby), zip-line in trees, ride the cable tram, have authentic indigenous people perform dances and buy their handicrafts, and make a boat tour for double the price you pay at the public harbor next-door. Do not expect the tour desk to know anything about the Pipeline, Plantation, or multitude of spectacular other historical trails that exist in the Soberania park. That's not in their business interest. They can't even produce a map. Keeping these caveats in mind, the hotel is a great and relaxing place to be.

Built on the grounds of the US sports club from the days the canal was constructed, adding information about the history of this place and its inhabitants would enhance the guest experience. Rather than having useless old encyclopedias and comic strips in multiple languages to fill the shelves, the wonderful classic resort library on the 1st floor would be the obvious place for this information. The hotel entrance is via a ghost town of deserted termite-affected colonial-style houses. It is located in the ten-mile US-zone where the local population was ousted during canal construction, their water supplies poisoned to reduce yellow fever for the construction workers, their business destroyed when the railway from 1855 was moved, and their lands inundated to form the canal route. For this, I highly recommend reading Marixa Lassa's excellent book "Erased, the untold story of the Panama canal (2019)." The 90's style quasi-colonial design includes rooms with TV screens on thin walls, with some neighboring rooms having interconnecting doors. It allowed us to 'enjoy' the loud movie programs of our apparently late sleeping neighbor and his extensive snoring once he finished watching it. Last but not least: stay away from the Piña Colada's. They were the worst (with cubes in place of blended ice) and most expensive ones we ever had, without any traces of rum.

The location was pretty, lots of nice walking trails to see wildlife

The staff told us the trails were no good, and we should pay for the (overpriced) tours instead. Limited amenities and facilities. No response from guest services or reception.