Novotel Makkah Thaker City

New hotel, so rooms are nice but very small can’t even pray. Absolutely pathetic service. We reached at 16:00, that is standard checking time. There were four guys and one lady on the front desk but only two were working. Rest were busy chit chatting. So the checking lines were really long. Took us about half an hour+ to just check in. There was no help available to help you with luggage from taxi to reception. As all of them wanted to stay in AC and reception guy was helpless. After checking in and dragging my luggage to lifts now all of them wanted to help, which was of no use. The hotel says free shuttle but please don’t fall for that. Shuttle drops you far away from haram. Minimum walk time is 15 mins if you are fit and young. And also for return, shuttle is not very punctual. You may be standing at the pick up point for an hour and the shuttle might not show up. (Thursday evening 3rd august I waited for 45 mins 1955-2040), no sign of shuttle and ended up taking a taxi at the end. In case you use shuttle from hotel to haram, don’t waste your precious time waiting for shuttle. Taxi will charge you 10SR to take you back to the hotel even during peak hours from the spot where shuttle drops. If you want to use Uber/Careem from hotel to haram, good luck. Location is so bad that no Uber driver wants to come here. One canceled on us and second one took 30 mins to reach. And this was 2pm. Not a peak time. Breakfast is good but space is so congested, that there is no space to walk, hence very long lineups for food and very congested seating. Overall, was not a good experience comfort wise. They can highly improve on customer service.

This hotel doesn’t deal with phone calls at all, I have been calling the front desk for an hour to get a hear dryer and no one answered. There is a construction site in front of the hotel and it is noisy day and night. The stuff of this hotel are not professional. The room service is worse than the front desk. It took me 30 minutes to call them, then the I had the worst chicken sandwich ever. The bottom line, I highly don’t recommend staying in this hotel. It is not worth it.

Realistically the rooms are fine. Only the staff members are not nice. We requested through agoda one king size and one room twin bedded. They offered only twin bedded room but when I made noise they agree to change. They are not trained to deal nicely with customers. Check out time was too strict 12.00 pm and was Friday prayer they accepted to have late check out 14.30 after call. The cleaning is ok. Shuttle bus is terrible you will miss prayers. First when i checked in they said you have no booking. Then they realized. A lot of customers complained about the service.