Review - Hotel Eden Bleu - Seychelles
The second hotel on our Seychelles trip this year was the Hotel Eden Bleu on Eden Island near the capital Victoria. After the fantastic Hilton Labriz, the (cheaper) Eden Bleu could only lose. I didn’t expect much and, unfortunately, I was not positively surprised. “But the photos look great!”, I hear you say. True, the “hard product” really was nice: all new and an open and bright interior design. So, why did we leave the Eden Bleu disappointed?
Atmosphere
The Eden Bleu is a fairly new hotel on an artificial island called Eden. It is a guarded neighbourhood with vacation homes for sale (or Airbnb’ed apartments) with direct access to a marina, a private beach, restaurants and other leisure facilities.
The hotel blends into the style of the houses built on the island and I actually liked it. An interesting mixture of Scandinavian design and open tropical Balinese style.
Room
Is that a love handle?
Our room was their most basic double room on the ground floor. It was big enough for us and even had a terrace looking at a tree and a small wall. Not the best view, but still fine for us. Quality of the furniture and appliances was acceptable.
The open 360 degrees glass shower cabin is not for everyone. We didn’t mind.
Pool
The outdoor pool overlooking the marina was pretty cool and actually a nice area to spend your lazy time while sipping a Campari O…
…or having a bite while watching the stars.
The gym
Now, this is more of a joke. I asked for the gym and was told that they don’t have their own. I could use the public gym in the neighbouring mall for free. And I did that - once. Never again, because it had kind of a backstreet vibe about it, not that of a tropical island paradise. The changing room was dirty, the machines were not the best and the barbell area was much too small and stuffed. Btw, there is also no spa in or around the hotel.
Summary
| Hotel | Eden Bleu |
|---|---|
| Brand | independent |
| Good |
|
| Bad |
|
| CT Points | 80 |
The idea of Eden island and the hotel was to create a first class neighbourhood for the wealthy customers. At least that was the idea of the investors, unfortunately the luxurious ambitions have not been achieved in many ways. The quality of the food was not that good in the restaurants on the island, the shopping mall did not have any interesting shops for us, and the gym (in the mall, which is the one for the hotel guests as well) was more like a backstreet gym.
But the main problem we had with the hotel, was the service: it was simply non-existent. We had the direct comparison from the great Hilton Labriz the nights before, but even if we hadn’t, it would have been noticeable: the nicest building, interior design and location will be lifeless and sad without a warm, proactive, customer-centric and motivated service team with attention to detail that makes all the difference.
We used the Eden Bleu for our home base when doing a day trip to Praslin via Air Seychelles and to visit Victoria. That is the main plus point: the hotel is one of the few ones on the airport-side of the island.
Considering all this, there is no reason why you shouldn’t just book an apartment on Eden Island via Airbnb or similar. There is also no service or gym there, but it’s possibly cheaper.
On our next hotel things were looking up for us - stay tuned for the last Seychelles review this year!
Dreaming of travelling the stars
