The Neela Boutique Hotel Stone Town

The hotel is located in a small alley but has a relatively large building with multiple floors. The atmosphere features an old-style building. The breakfast is excellent, and booking a stay with dinner included would be even better. However, it might be a bit noisy since it's in the city.

Cute boutique hotel with amazing staff! Great location to walk around and explore Stone town with a 3-minute walk to the beach. Food was amazing. Get the lobster ravioli. So good! Compliments to the chef! The room was beautiful. If you have mobility issues, ask for a room on the lower floors as it is a 3-floor walkup to other rooms. No elevator available.

Located in central of Stone Town. We needed 5 minutes by foot to the beach. Great breakfast, one of the best we had in Africa. We also had dinner at the rooftop redtaurant of the hotel, which was also very good. The room was nice, with climatisation and everything needed.

I had a terrible accident as soon as my friend and I checked in at the Neela. While the hotel porter was carrying my luggage on the stairs, it slipped from his shoulder and fell on my hand. The luggage being an 18kg piece, the consequences on my hand have been dramatic. I am writing this 1.5 month after the accident. I had to go through emergency surgery, wear a cast for one month and now going through an intensive 2-month physiotherapy, hoping that I will eventually get back partially my hand’s mobility. Since it is the right hand and I am hand written, needless to elaborate on the damages I have been suffering on my daily actions. Everything stopped or changed. While an accident may happen anywhere anytime, I do have a couple of comments on the way it has been handled by the hotel: -It took almost an hour to get a doctor while I was crying my eyes out in pain. The staff were definitely untrained to deal with such emergencies and most of them seemed to be actually trained not to let such incidents distract them from work! -While the manager in duty (Mrs. Khadija) took me to the hospital when the doctor asked for it to do an x-ray and get pain killers and insisted on putting on the house our airport transfer and our 2 meals, she did not seem unfortunately to have any empathy for the great pain I was experiencing. -When we got back home to get treatment (as the local hospital couldn’t do much and we were flying out the following day), the manager sent one single message to follow-up and, when told that I was getting emergency surgery and that my condition was very bad, never replied back. This tells how the manager did not actually care about the consequences of an accident that happened in the hotel she is managing, and all she was worried about was whether I would sue them legally. I chose not to because I did not want the porter to get hurt. However, I do believe that the hotel management owes me a lot as my whole life has turned into a nightmare because of what happened at the Neela. On the hotel itself, while my friend and I both paid almost 400$ for one night, our rooms were completely different in size (hers was twice as big). A room definitely not worth 400$ anyway. Because of the Neela, I would remember Stone Town as a dark spot for a long time ahead…

Easily the best thing about the Neela was my room (1), which was cosy, clean, insect-free (a huge plus after my last stop!), and had good air conditioning and WiFi. The rest of the hotel I would say is just OK - the location is convenient enough, but you walk through some pretty drab alleys to get there and it's not by the sea (unlike the Park Hyatt which feeds directly onto the beach), and there's no pool. The food I had was pretty average, although the staff were very nice. If you're passing through Stone Town for a night I'd say it's a reasonable choice, but I'm not sure if I would choose it for a longer stay.