Sala Done Khone Hotel

ห้องพักสะอาด แต่การเดินทางต้องข้ามแม่น้ำ

We booked the floating bungalow for 3 nights. Easy enough to get here. View from bungalow is lovely. Room is fine and fridge welcome. Bathroom very old. Totally my fault but I left an open packet of biscuits in the room and was rewarded with a nighttime visit of probably a water rat. The walkway to the bungalow is very unkempt but the island itself is full of rubbish. No-one seems to care! I found it shocking - plastic everywhere. We ate only in the restaurant. They could do with a dedicated waitress at dinner as the service is poor. Take no notice of some items like T-Bone steak which apparently is impossible to procure. We did the sunset tour and tuk tuk island tour and hired bicycles so we could see Don Det. If this place was cleared of rubbish it would be a vast improvement. We enjoyed our time here and I understand the difficulties with running a hotel on an island but there would be e many locals to help improve things. I hope this happens.

We rented a floating room with a terrace on the Mekong, which could have been simply sumptuous. The problem is that the owner takes no care of his establishment and is content to maximise his current monopoly position on the island. Indeed, the hotel is the only establishment currently (July 2022) open for the whole of Khone Island and Det Island (the 2 islands communicate via the French Bridge) and also has the only restaurant open on both islands. The bathroom is not clean (like the rest of the hotel), one bed smells of urine and the springs of the other one are coming out, the arrival to the room by a small bridge is simply littered with plastic bottles that the owner does not even bother to fish out. The service in the restaurant is very slow (45 minutes waiting time for each of the 3 meals we had there per day as there is no other restaurant open on the two islands), the portions served are very small and some dishes are downright bad, the best ones not exceeding the "ordinary" note. The restaurant is lit with white neon lights, the tablecloths are dirty, and the owner just shakes the dirt on the floor. For a so-called sunset inter-island tour (the pilot told us at 17.30 that the sun was hidden behind clouds, while sunset was at 18.30 and the inter-island ride was limited to a standard super slow crossing to the port from where we had left to reach the hotel on the day of our arrival) he charged us 360000 Laks, which is exorbitant. The bikes he rents have no brakes, no bell and have badly inflated tyres. I'll stop the list of my complaints here, but for every other service, we got a terrible price-quality ratio. We are all the more sorry to give this opinion as the place could be superb with a minimum of involvement from the owner, as well as respect for his customers.