Mercure Rayong Lomtalay Villas & Resort

We were looking for a quick budget midweek break and selected the Mercure. Having travelled a fair amount over the last five years or so, based on previous experiences the Mercure offers good value, pretty good accommodation. One of my favourite hotels is a Mercure. This one I think is mis advertised it’s more up market maybe a Grand Mercure or better. On arrival the staff were friendly and made us welcome, the room was lovely (free upgrade maybe helped), walk around the resort everything was as it should be tidy and clean. A Quick late lunch sharing a pizza and desert both very nice, a bit later a visit to the swimming pool staff brought towels and setup chairs and umbrella offered drinks explained about happy hour. Evening turndown service a first for me in a Mercure not quite like Sofitel no refill coffee pods or drinking water but a big surprise. Breakfast barista coffee and a good choice of foods buffet style Asian and western flavours. Evening Dinner good choice of food but only one restaurant open at moment I think they have 3 when fully open. For me some of the western food choices were expensive for Thailand / Mercure brand but there was plenty of choice my wife enjoyed the Thai food she ordered I ordered the expensive (in my opinion) beef burger based on the excellent pizza from the previous day lunch with big expectations unfortunately it did not deliver - had to cut meat with a knife!

Room is small. Water leak from shower. Poor room service. Breakfast is just like a small resort and taste so bland. Only good thing is location. Not worth it.

Overall good, atmosphere & services. But we found some points that you should improve - bathroom: 1407 very slow flow of water in shower area and once open the door the water flood into the toilet section. Whole bathroom is all wet! - no place to put shampoo/soap/etc stuff in shower area

We were looking forward to our week end at the mercure for days. It started pretty poorly. I made a reservation by phone to the hotel because the ALL app wasn’t working properly. When we arrived (2 adults, 2 kids), after a 3 hour drive from Bangkok on Friday night (after a long day of work), we were surprised to know that our booking did not exist! Moreover we were told that the hotel was full so that we could only stay one night. Surprise! The kids were sleeping in the lobby, my wife was about to go nuclear. We were proposed to stay one night and then to figure it out for ourselves. We decided to stay the night and book a night for the next day at the nearby Novotel. The staff at the front desk was pretty inexperienced and didn’t really know how to handle the situation. Hopefully, the manager came to us the next day with a solution: a free upgrade to an available room. On the next day, we were at the restaurant, and asked to get some sparkling wine bottle from the wine list. A few minutes later, we were told to come and check the available product by ourselves. Here the staff clearly didn’t do their homework: it’s not the customer’s job to check for the available products. It is something to be done before the shift starts. Here again, the manager in charge of the waiters did a good job to turn around the situation. All in all, some staff is quite inexperienced, and not very well trained. The managers understand what customer experience means. I’d suggest them to use these customer’s complaints as training opportunity with their staff. Most of the other staff we were interacting with were competent and nice. Besides that, the hotel is a gem. Brand new, well designed, very nice to hang around (the chairs and sofas in front of the beach are comfy), the beach and pool are very nice. Well located, there is a long and calm beach nearby. The buffets (breakfast and Saturday evening) were tasty and well managed. The room was clean. All in all, we had a very good week end and look forward to going there again.

I am not sure who designs hotel rooms these days but I would say that the glass partitions for the toilet and shower are not the best idea. We had a deluxe villa (Room 2104) and the addition of sliding or folding solid doors between the bathroom area and the bedroom/living room would be a great addition. The outside garden area would do well to have better rain protection as both when it rained and after the maid service it was very wet. The staff were all wonderful. We had stayed at Lom Talay before Mercure took over and the rebuild was a big improvement.