LindaBabe
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 20, 1999
This is just the portion of my report where I discuss AKV. We had a lovely trip despite some rocky bits.
The first day booking was available, I was on the horn at 8:59:59, to book our first stay on the first day the new villas would be available to the public...
The front desk was reasonably efficient, although there were a few little questions due to it being the first day members were staying in the villas. Had it been a hotel room, we could have had it right then, but because it was a villa, we had to wait until 4 pm. We were prepared for that, but it sure had consequences later in the day. . .
Time passed, during which we went to MGM and dined.
After that, since we’d been up since 5 am, I seem to recall we called it a night and went back to the hotel, got our room number and had the luggage brought up (5529 – the far end of the 4th pod – Thank HEAVENS for the ecv). My request had been for a savannah view room close to the elevator, and indicated we’d be there by noon.
Then, the fun began. Not. At 8 pm after a long tiring day, I have neither the wit nor the patience for problem solving. By the time we got settled in, I was more than a little annoyed.
Let me preface this by saying - we’ve stayed in AKL hotel rooms on the 5th floor before, for up to 4 days, and found them to be lovely, spacious and with plenty of storage space. The ecv usually fits conveniently just beyond the closet before the dresser and near a plug. Not in this room!
The rooms are still lovely, with tent canvas tan drapes, carved dark wood furniture, and African themed soft goods. On closer inspection, they resemble a furniture store. Virtually every inch of wall space has a piece of furniture against it. The ecv had to live in the hall. Thank heavens there was a plug!
As you enter the door, on the left, there is a closet about 2.5 – 3 feet wide and a bit more than a foot deep. It might once have been the doorway to the adjoining room, or it could have been the niche for the little tallboy that I think used to be there. This has a shelf with a hanging rod under, but the rod is only 2-3 inches from the front wall/door, so any hanger on it is pushed up on end or sideways, dumping it’s contents, when the door is shut, which is always when not in use, because it blocks the entrance hall.
This closet contains – iron and ironing board, vacuum cleaner (WHO vacuums on vacation???? Not ME, babes!), a luggage rack, and an enormous plastic bag full of bedding on the shelf (about the size of a beanbag chair). Hmm. I guess we won’t be putting much in here.
Same side, where the closet used to be, is now the kitchen. Nice counter top with about a square foot of work space. Tiny sink. Full size coffee maker and toaster. Narrow shelf above the counter holding a small microwave. Two cupboards, almost out of my reach (I’m 5’7”) containing 4 china cups, 4 paper plates, 4 paper bowls and 4 sets of plastic utensils. 1 can opener. Under the counter was storage, trash and the fridge.
Ah the fridge. Instead of being a full depth under counter fridge, it’s only about a foot deep. The ice cube tray was a joke – soft plastic with openings the size of snack size candy bars – you might get enough ice out of it for a drink. Fortunately, you can trek down the hall to an ice machine. In order to get a gallon of water into the fridge, I had to remove a shelf. The shelf the gallon rested on was just deep enough to hold it. Fortunately, with the dining plan, we had little need to store food in the fridge, because it wouldn’t have fit.
In OKW, the fridge will hold a 2.5 gal dispenser container of water, as well as a veggie tray, fruit bowl and carton of fried chicken. That would NOT have happened here, so it’s a good thing we saw the storage space available before we did the grocery stop.
At the end of the kitchen, is a little wall. In the other side of the wall is the safe and AC controls (which I don’t think really control anything) with a padded bench under. Directly next to that, no space, is an enormous armoire with two doors. One door had a shelf and a hanging rod about 15 inches wide. The other side had . . . nothing. No shelf. No rod. Nothing. Hmm. Shall I store B. in there?
Then there was a space not quite wide enough for a pair of adult shoes side by side. The dresser followed, another massive piece, containing a flat panel TV, a narrow shallow shelf (height clearance maybe 2 – 3 inches, depth about enough for a wallet or park map lying sideways. The dresser top (Yeah! a flat surface) 4 pretty narrow shallow drawers under, and two doors under that. BUT when we went to stack shorts behind the doors, we discovered it was full – of a crib. B eventually chucked that under the bathroom sinks so we’d have the space for our clothes.
Immediately after the dresser is a round table, good size, and two massive, heavy dining style chairs with arms. Then, the outside wall. That whole side of the room is nothing but furniture! Yet we felt storage space was lacking. (Later, we did discover another drawer under the bench.)
Starting at the door on the right side, Is the bathroom wall, and then the dressing area/sinks, with a narrow shelf above. Didn’t there used to be a shelf below, too? There is in at least one of the dvc’s. As it is our counter was always cluttered with toiletries and chargers (convenient plug). The bathroom is one of those where you have to stand in the tub or behind the toilet to shut the bathroom door.
Anyway, beside the sinks then was the wall on that side, papered on the bathroom side and stucco on the bedroom side. I scraped my arms a few times before I learned to edge in sideways. About a 15 inch space, and then the massive bed – so high I had to lay down and then lift my legs on to the mattress – no climbing up for this old babe. BUT not high enough to slide suitcases under, because the height was all mattress and not much legs. Beyond the bed, about a foot space, then the nightstand, then another foot or so, then the loveseat size couch and another table, this one with a lamp. In front of the couch two sturdy square coffee tables. Over the nightstand, were the controls for all the rooms lights except the table lamp and the wall lamp over the table.
What’s missing? Well, a bedside table and light on ‘her’ side of the bed would have been nice. There’s no place for glasses or a book or my c-pap machine, and no light for reading in bed.
We tried to put one of the coffee tables in the space. Not wide enough.
We tried to move the bed over to make space. It’s welded to the wall.
We tried using the bathroom wastebasket upside down. The wicker bottom fell out when we picked it up.
We ended up with the recycling bin upside down.
Oh, and there’s no plug on that side of the bed, either. Thank heavens I had the forethought to bring an extension cord!
Anyway, if the person on the wall side of the bed happens to be the last one down for the night, she has to turn out the lights and maneuver the distance around the bed in the dark. My shins are dark too, from barking them on the bed frame.
In my opinion, management was in such a rush to get the rooms on the market, they decorated them to LOOK good to potential buyers (they do) but did not even spend one minute THINKING about how they might work for the inhabitants. My letter to them will address that, as well as suggest some easy modifications:
1. Let people in when the rooms are ready, not at some artificially determined hour of 4 pm. They’ll never be able to convince me that at 3:59, maids magically pop out of all the rooms, housekeeping complete. Especially I would like them to be considerate of people who tell you in advance they are arriving early and / or have health issues / small children needing naps. (I, personally, being slow to rile, could have dealt with the space issues much better had I not already been exhausted. As it is, I’m still sufficiently annoyed as to talk about it, as you see, at some length. )
2. Have a closet in the trash room for a few vacuums, ironing boards and cribs. If someone needed one, they could either go and get it, or a crib could be put in the relevant room when a family was checking in. I’ll bet some of that stuff goes years without being used once.
3. Move the bed to the left by a foot, leaving room for a table and a lamp on the other side.
4. Put shelves and /or a shelf and a rod in the other side of the armoire.
5. If they can’t move the bed, at least put a shelf on the wall at the head of the bed on the right, to hold a light and life’s necessities. It’s not like one can even reach down to put them on the floor from the exceptional height of the bed.
6. Install a full width shelf under the bathroom counter.
7. Install full depth refrigerators with real ice cube trays. And for heavens sake, paper plates are cheap – there’s no need to count them out so carefully! People will only use what they need, for the most part.
While we’re on the subject of the room, there’s one other point worth mentioning. . . I always wondered how two people in savanna view rooms could have such different experiences regarding how many animals they saw. You’ll read a report where the guests saw marvelous numbers at all hours and others where guests saw none. I now understand why – within a 5 minute time span I could look off our balcony and see no animals, walk two pods toward the center and see some, elevator down two floors and see tons!
From the rooms on the third floor, the entire Arusha savanna is visible under the canopy of trees. One can see animals clear to the back of the property. The rest of the building is barely visible. From the inner pods, that is those closest to the lobby on both sides, where there is a clearing around the trail to Arusha rock, one can see quite a few animals from all floors, and they frequent those cleared areas.
But from the upper floors in the end pods, all one sees are tree tops, the 5th floor and lights on the other arm of the resort, occasional feet and legs, if creatures venture close to the edge of the forest, and those animals that are directly in the treeless area close to the building (very few). If it had been important to me (as it might be to a child) to be able to watch the animals often, I’d have been very disappointed.
Finally, to bed – heavenly mattress, ungodly wrinkles (on the bed, not me – the BED!). Instead of flat sheets that barely tuck in, and come untucked as soon as you lay down, WHY can’t they put fitted sheets on these beds????
----Time passes. Before I left, I'd been reading the thread about 'self extenders'. Far from extending, we weren't even allowed to finish our stay before someone tried to take over our room!
Friday. Time is running out and I needed to do laundry again. It had taken three tries to find out where the dvc laundry room is – the front desk didn’t have a clue. Finally, B. buttonholed a maintenance person who did know – ALL the way at the far end of the 5th floor hall, next to the lobby.
Saturday. Back at the lodge, housekeeping hadn’t been (it was full clean day, and I was looking forward to a nice tightly made bed with NO wrinkles) so we changed up and went to the pool. Up an hour late, room still not done. I went in the shower and after a while hear voices and rustling. The housekeeper apparently took the trash, dumped off a month’s worth of towels, and that’s IT! Grrrr.
Saturday evening: When I got back to the room (from the shop), my key didn’t work in the lock, although I tried several times. Fortunately, B was inside and let me in, sputtering about the key. “That’s not all!” says he. “Someone ELSE has keys to this room! A woman opened the door and walked in on me!” Housekeeping? I asked. NO! A guest!
I got on the horn to the front desk. Oh, sorry. Someone will be right up. So we waited. And waited. And waited. Our ps at Artist Point was getting closer and closer. His idea of ‘right up’ and ours were two different things. I called again. You’ll have to come down and get new keys! But . . . but . . .! You need new keys!
So, we gathered up our things, loaded up the ecv one last time and headed for the lobby. On the third floor, we ran into a cm with some key envelopes in her hands. Excuse me! Is one of those possibly for us? It was. Is the dining credits on it? Yes, there it is on the bottom. (I had saved 4 credits for our dinner at Artist Point.)
Finally, it was time for the bill – we warned Andre there might be ‘issues’ with our card, and there were. He eventually tried both the old and new cards, and had to involve a manager. They were both very nice and apologetic, but, considering the half hour they’d wrestled with it, I knew I’d be spending some quality time with the front desk.
Back at the lodge, B headed up to the room, and I to the front desk. I asked Ignacio for a print out of my charges and dining plan credits – he gave me credits remaining – which was wrong, and my charges – which had the bill from artists Point charged to it! I told Ignacio he really didn’t want to hear my long complex story and to please get me a manager. After some considerable time passed with him in the back room, Enter Liliana. The cavalry is here!
She was a huge help. It took a while. Quite a while. She was understanding. She was quietly competent and sure that she could resolve the issue. When she was done, I had two more new key cards and presumably a correct bill. ( I went upstairs, got all the old cards and put them away so we wouldn’t get totally confused!)
Sunday – a sad morning, to be sure, but I was so stressed from the hassle over the room keys / dining credits and so forth that I was actually ready to go home, for once. Even the bill on the door was wrong this morning.
It took another visit to the front desk and another half hour before the situation was resolved to my satisfaction.
We have decided to wait until Kidani village is open - and has been open for a while - before our next visit to AKL. It did not meet my expectations, and a letter has been sent.
The first day booking was available, I was on the horn at 8:59:59, to book our first stay on the first day the new villas would be available to the public...
The front desk was reasonably efficient, although there were a few little questions due to it being the first day members were staying in the villas. Had it been a hotel room, we could have had it right then, but because it was a villa, we had to wait until 4 pm. We were prepared for that, but it sure had consequences later in the day. . .
Time passed, during which we went to MGM and dined.
After that, since we’d been up since 5 am, I seem to recall we called it a night and went back to the hotel, got our room number and had the luggage brought up (5529 – the far end of the 4th pod – Thank HEAVENS for the ecv). My request had been for a savannah view room close to the elevator, and indicated we’d be there by noon.
Then, the fun began. Not. At 8 pm after a long tiring day, I have neither the wit nor the patience for problem solving. By the time we got settled in, I was more than a little annoyed.
Let me preface this by saying - we’ve stayed in AKL hotel rooms on the 5th floor before, for up to 4 days, and found them to be lovely, spacious and with plenty of storage space. The ecv usually fits conveniently just beyond the closet before the dresser and near a plug. Not in this room!
The rooms are still lovely, with tent canvas tan drapes, carved dark wood furniture, and African themed soft goods. On closer inspection, they resemble a furniture store. Virtually every inch of wall space has a piece of furniture against it. The ecv had to live in the hall. Thank heavens there was a plug!
As you enter the door, on the left, there is a closet about 2.5 – 3 feet wide and a bit more than a foot deep. It might once have been the doorway to the adjoining room, or it could have been the niche for the little tallboy that I think used to be there. This has a shelf with a hanging rod under, but the rod is only 2-3 inches from the front wall/door, so any hanger on it is pushed up on end or sideways, dumping it’s contents, when the door is shut, which is always when not in use, because it blocks the entrance hall.
This closet contains – iron and ironing board, vacuum cleaner (WHO vacuums on vacation???? Not ME, babes!), a luggage rack, and an enormous plastic bag full of bedding on the shelf (about the size of a beanbag chair). Hmm. I guess we won’t be putting much in here.
Same side, where the closet used to be, is now the kitchen. Nice counter top with about a square foot of work space. Tiny sink. Full size coffee maker and toaster. Narrow shelf above the counter holding a small microwave. Two cupboards, almost out of my reach (I’m 5’7”) containing 4 china cups, 4 paper plates, 4 paper bowls and 4 sets of plastic utensils. 1 can opener. Under the counter was storage, trash and the fridge.
Ah the fridge. Instead of being a full depth under counter fridge, it’s only about a foot deep. The ice cube tray was a joke – soft plastic with openings the size of snack size candy bars – you might get enough ice out of it for a drink. Fortunately, you can trek down the hall to an ice machine. In order to get a gallon of water into the fridge, I had to remove a shelf. The shelf the gallon rested on was just deep enough to hold it. Fortunately, with the dining plan, we had little need to store food in the fridge, because it wouldn’t have fit.
In OKW, the fridge will hold a 2.5 gal dispenser container of water, as well as a veggie tray, fruit bowl and carton of fried chicken. That would NOT have happened here, so it’s a good thing we saw the storage space available before we did the grocery stop.
At the end of the kitchen, is a little wall. In the other side of the wall is the safe and AC controls (which I don’t think really control anything) with a padded bench under. Directly next to that, no space, is an enormous armoire with two doors. One door had a shelf and a hanging rod about 15 inches wide. The other side had . . . nothing. No shelf. No rod. Nothing. Hmm. Shall I store B. in there?
Then there was a space not quite wide enough for a pair of adult shoes side by side. The dresser followed, another massive piece, containing a flat panel TV, a narrow shallow shelf (height clearance maybe 2 – 3 inches, depth about enough for a wallet or park map lying sideways. The dresser top (Yeah! a flat surface) 4 pretty narrow shallow drawers under, and two doors under that. BUT when we went to stack shorts behind the doors, we discovered it was full – of a crib. B eventually chucked that under the bathroom sinks so we’d have the space for our clothes.
Immediately after the dresser is a round table, good size, and two massive, heavy dining style chairs with arms. Then, the outside wall. That whole side of the room is nothing but furniture! Yet we felt storage space was lacking. (Later, we did discover another drawer under the bench.)
Starting at the door on the right side, Is the bathroom wall, and then the dressing area/sinks, with a narrow shelf above. Didn’t there used to be a shelf below, too? There is in at least one of the dvc’s. As it is our counter was always cluttered with toiletries and chargers (convenient plug). The bathroom is one of those where you have to stand in the tub or behind the toilet to shut the bathroom door.
Anyway, beside the sinks then was the wall on that side, papered on the bathroom side and stucco on the bedroom side. I scraped my arms a few times before I learned to edge in sideways. About a 15 inch space, and then the massive bed – so high I had to lay down and then lift my legs on to the mattress – no climbing up for this old babe. BUT not high enough to slide suitcases under, because the height was all mattress and not much legs. Beyond the bed, about a foot space, then the nightstand, then another foot or so, then the loveseat size couch and another table, this one with a lamp. In front of the couch two sturdy square coffee tables. Over the nightstand, were the controls for all the rooms lights except the table lamp and the wall lamp over the table.
What’s missing? Well, a bedside table and light on ‘her’ side of the bed would have been nice. There’s no place for glasses or a book or my c-pap machine, and no light for reading in bed.
We tried to put one of the coffee tables in the space. Not wide enough.
We tried to move the bed over to make space. It’s welded to the wall.
We tried using the bathroom wastebasket upside down. The wicker bottom fell out when we picked it up.
We ended up with the recycling bin upside down.
Oh, and there’s no plug on that side of the bed, either. Thank heavens I had the forethought to bring an extension cord!
Anyway, if the person on the wall side of the bed happens to be the last one down for the night, she has to turn out the lights and maneuver the distance around the bed in the dark. My shins are dark too, from barking them on the bed frame.
In my opinion, management was in such a rush to get the rooms on the market, they decorated them to LOOK good to potential buyers (they do) but did not even spend one minute THINKING about how they might work for the inhabitants. My letter to them will address that, as well as suggest some easy modifications:
1. Let people in when the rooms are ready, not at some artificially determined hour of 4 pm. They’ll never be able to convince me that at 3:59, maids magically pop out of all the rooms, housekeeping complete. Especially I would like them to be considerate of people who tell you in advance they are arriving early and / or have health issues / small children needing naps. (I, personally, being slow to rile, could have dealt with the space issues much better had I not already been exhausted. As it is, I’m still sufficiently annoyed as to talk about it, as you see, at some length. )
2. Have a closet in the trash room for a few vacuums, ironing boards and cribs. If someone needed one, they could either go and get it, or a crib could be put in the relevant room when a family was checking in. I’ll bet some of that stuff goes years without being used once.
3. Move the bed to the left by a foot, leaving room for a table and a lamp on the other side.
4. Put shelves and /or a shelf and a rod in the other side of the armoire.
5. If they can’t move the bed, at least put a shelf on the wall at the head of the bed on the right, to hold a light and life’s necessities. It’s not like one can even reach down to put them on the floor from the exceptional height of the bed.
6. Install a full width shelf under the bathroom counter.
7. Install full depth refrigerators with real ice cube trays. And for heavens sake, paper plates are cheap – there’s no need to count them out so carefully! People will only use what they need, for the most part.
While we’re on the subject of the room, there’s one other point worth mentioning. . . I always wondered how two people in savanna view rooms could have such different experiences regarding how many animals they saw. You’ll read a report where the guests saw marvelous numbers at all hours and others where guests saw none. I now understand why – within a 5 minute time span I could look off our balcony and see no animals, walk two pods toward the center and see some, elevator down two floors and see tons!
From the rooms on the third floor, the entire Arusha savanna is visible under the canopy of trees. One can see animals clear to the back of the property. The rest of the building is barely visible. From the inner pods, that is those closest to the lobby on both sides, where there is a clearing around the trail to Arusha rock, one can see quite a few animals from all floors, and they frequent those cleared areas.
But from the upper floors in the end pods, all one sees are tree tops, the 5th floor and lights on the other arm of the resort, occasional feet and legs, if creatures venture close to the edge of the forest, and those animals that are directly in the treeless area close to the building (very few). If it had been important to me (as it might be to a child) to be able to watch the animals often, I’d have been very disappointed.
Finally, to bed – heavenly mattress, ungodly wrinkles (on the bed, not me – the BED!). Instead of flat sheets that barely tuck in, and come untucked as soon as you lay down, WHY can’t they put fitted sheets on these beds????
----Time passes. Before I left, I'd been reading the thread about 'self extenders'. Far from extending, we weren't even allowed to finish our stay before someone tried to take over our room!
Friday. Time is running out and I needed to do laundry again. It had taken three tries to find out where the dvc laundry room is – the front desk didn’t have a clue. Finally, B. buttonholed a maintenance person who did know – ALL the way at the far end of the 5th floor hall, next to the lobby.
Saturday. Back at the lodge, housekeeping hadn’t been (it was full clean day, and I was looking forward to a nice tightly made bed with NO wrinkles) so we changed up and went to the pool. Up an hour late, room still not done. I went in the shower and after a while hear voices and rustling. The housekeeper apparently took the trash, dumped off a month’s worth of towels, and that’s IT! Grrrr.
Saturday evening: When I got back to the room (from the shop), my key didn’t work in the lock, although I tried several times. Fortunately, B was inside and let me in, sputtering about the key. “That’s not all!” says he. “Someone ELSE has keys to this room! A woman opened the door and walked in on me!” Housekeeping? I asked. NO! A guest!
I got on the horn to the front desk. Oh, sorry. Someone will be right up. So we waited. And waited. And waited. Our ps at Artist Point was getting closer and closer. His idea of ‘right up’ and ours were two different things. I called again. You’ll have to come down and get new keys! But . . . but . . .! You need new keys!
So, we gathered up our things, loaded up the ecv one last time and headed for the lobby. On the third floor, we ran into a cm with some key envelopes in her hands. Excuse me! Is one of those possibly for us? It was. Is the dining credits on it? Yes, there it is on the bottom. (I had saved 4 credits for our dinner at Artist Point.)
Finally, it was time for the bill – we warned Andre there might be ‘issues’ with our card, and there were. He eventually tried both the old and new cards, and had to involve a manager. They were both very nice and apologetic, but, considering the half hour they’d wrestled with it, I knew I’d be spending some quality time with the front desk.
Back at the lodge, B headed up to the room, and I to the front desk. I asked Ignacio for a print out of my charges and dining plan credits – he gave me credits remaining – which was wrong, and my charges – which had the bill from artists Point charged to it! I told Ignacio he really didn’t want to hear my long complex story and to please get me a manager. After some considerable time passed with him in the back room, Enter Liliana. The cavalry is here!
She was a huge help. It took a while. Quite a while. She was understanding. She was quietly competent and sure that she could resolve the issue. When she was done, I had two more new key cards and presumably a correct bill. ( I went upstairs, got all the old cards and put them away so we wouldn’t get totally confused!)
Sunday – a sad morning, to be sure, but I was so stressed from the hassle over the room keys / dining credits and so forth that I was actually ready to go home, for once. Even the bill on the door was wrong this morning.
It took another visit to the front desk and another half hour before the situation was resolved to my satisfaction.
We have decided to wait until Kidani village is open - and has been open for a while - before our next visit to AKL. It did not meet my expectations, and a letter has been sent.
