Novotel Kinshasa la Gombe

Best option for a quick business trip

This is a good hotel. The rooms are well-appointed, the food in the restaurant is excellent, the breakfasts are fantastic, and the staff are very friendly. The restaurant prices are high, but not unexpectedly high. The restaurant menu is limited, so if you are here for a prolonged time, you will get bored pretty soon. But the food is excellent. I am a seasoned traveller, with 33 African countries visited so far, countless hundreds of hotels ranging from 15USD to over 500USD. I've stayed in places with absolute luxury, and places with no water, shared toilets, and no AC, so I have learned to accept and overcome a lot. I have a lot of patience and I don't complain easily. However, the Novotel in Kinshasa warrants some criticism from me. The service in the hotel is way below the standard I expect from a hotel like this. It's not that the staff are unhelpful, because they are, it's just that everything here is so imprecise and inconsistent. One day you get two bottles of water in your room, the next day one, and the next day none. You get two towels one day, and none the next. One day there's one towel, and no toilet paper. The upstairs bar staff are terrible. You can wait 20 minutes for someone to ask what you'd like to order, and then it takes 20 minutes for a simple beer to arrive. They don't pay attention to you at all, and will often walk straight past you to serve someone else. A simple snack took aver an hour an a half one evening, and the place was not even full. I like to sit outside on the patio in the restaurant. Sometimes you get serviettes, sometimes you don't. There's ALWAYS a shortage of ashtrays. Table clearing is extremely slow. Sometimes tables are left uncleared for well over an hour after the table has been vacated. The coffee machines in the breakfast area are ALWAYS malfunctioning and no one seems to care. Every morning there is a struggle to get a cup of coffee without having to call a staff member to fix the machine. The bar prices for spirits are confusing. The only price on the menu is per bottle. I tried to get a straight answer of the price of a simple vodka and coke, and ended up paying USD60 for Beluga Vodka. Who on earth mixes premium vodka with coke? If there was a price list per shot, that would make much more sense. Then I found out that the hotel doesn't give the tips to the staff. If you sign for a meal, and add a tip, the hotel keeps that and the waiter sees none of it. I'm not surprised the waiters have no motivation to give better service. After I discovered this, I started tipping in cash, and oh boy, did the service improve! Anyway, as I said it is a good hotel, but there's certainly room for improvement which could easily be achieved with a minimal effort on the part of management.