Le Bordeaux Sapa Hotel

The accommodation's central location offers easy access to dining and travel options. Guests praised the comfortable, spacious rooms and friendly, attentive staff. The breakfast was also well-received.

Hotels are a tough business, so it's sad I'm writing a 2-star review. Let's first consider the business. Most businesses do one thing, or two at most, and that's their focus. Hotels have to run many facets well: cleaning, laundry, infrastructure maintenance, repairs to all the rooms and bathrooms and TV's and air-conditioning, renovations, running a kitchen making food 16 hours a day. Then there's managing personnel, scheduling and coordinating tradesmen, wholesale food supplies. And then, marketing and advertising, bookings, and all the admin of all those facets. Like I said, a hard industry to work in, let alone turn a profit. Le Bordeaux is struggling. My room had bugs, mould, unswept floors, broken lights, frayed and threadbare towels, dirt and dust. AirCon didn't cool the room. WiFi was poor. The hotel is at a busy intersection, and although they're not responsible for the horns honking from 6am to 11pm, the windows are not sound insulated. The restaurant is reasonably priced and offers a wide ranging menu of decent quality food, but can be slow. For $60 AUD a night, I've had much better. I hope they turn things around, and they could if they improved housekeeping, audited their WiFi, TVs and AirCon machines to make them work, and sped up the kitchen.