Ocean Bay Hotel and Resort

“ Fantastic hotel, we had a wonderful holiday. There was a problem with the booking on arrival, but this was sorted fairly quickly. The kids club workers were amazing and all staff friendly and helpful especially with children. The food was delicious and rooms comfortable and spacious. I hope to go back.

“ Top Tip: A lovely area to be in, take small toys/pens/notebooks for the local children and try to see the next door village.
Sherif is a great tour guide -in the RM tours office opposite and a little to the left of the entrance (they wear yellow shirts).

“ “5 star? No way. 3.5 star? Probably !”

Hotel

The hotel is set between the main road in Bakau (which is really only a side street and not exactly a main road as such) and the very impressive beach to the east of Cape Point, overlooking the River Gambia. Overall, an excellent setting.

Check-in
We arrived with around a dozen other people, which were checked-in by 3 reception staff. The process was fairly quick, and not as bad as I’d thought I’d expect given reviews elsewhere.

Room 1
The first room we were allocated (number 207) was the closest to the pool area (so that everyone would walk past it), on the ground floor and smelt of smoke. We we’re not settling for this, and let the hotel manager know of our discontent immediately. To their credit, we were asked to wait an hour or so whilst they checked other rooms availability and state of cleanliness, as they’d had some late departures. We used this time to eat dinner in the restaurant. Afterwards, we spoke again to the manager and we were shown another room, upstairs at the end of the corridor, of which the balcony overlooked the beach, which was perfect for us, and we accepted the replacement willingly. The room itself was of a good enough size, but with 2 single beds (we had requested a double) and the bathroom was all white and looked perfectly serviceable.

Room 2
This room (number 219) seemed to be slightly larger than the first, rejected, room, although the bathroom (shower room really), had brown tiling and really bad wall and floor tile grouting all over it, which completely ruined the look of the bathroom. However, it was perfectly useable and clean, although looked awful.
The single beds were requested to be changed into a double but the best they could do was make it up like a double but using larger sheets and blankets, but it still had a gap down the middle. The TV had a local channel (mostly religious stuff) and also BBC World, a South African sports channel (that had lots of English matches featured, sometimes live), a German channel, and CNN. The room had a double wardrobe, and shelves with a safe inside for valuables. There were no tea/coffee making facilities (bad for a supposed 5 star hotel) but there was a fridge with mini-bar inside. Neither were there any radio stations on the TV or elsewhere.

Restaurant
This is used for breakfast, lunch and dinner. There is both inside and outside seating.
Breakfast offered a range of breads, cakes, fresh fruits, cereals, fruit juices, tea and coffee and a table with the slowest waffle and toaster machines in Africa ! There are also 2 egg chefs who will make you your eggs any way you like them. Sadly it was not possible to both toast and eggs at the same time as you had to queue at either the toaster or the eggs whilst they were prepared.
Lunch had an al la carte menu plus the pizza oven menu or there was the ‘all- inclusive’offer if this was your board basis.
Dinner again had an al la carte menu, mostly international cuisine, with some local dishes included. There were no pizza’s available on the evening menu.
The meals we had there were perfectly pleasant and no reason to complain.
If you want more variety, Bakau offers a wide range of places to eat within a short walking distance offering Chinese, Italian, Indian and pub-grub type menu’s

Pool
The large swimming pool was perfectly tended. There are sun loungers, and with your check-in procedure, you get a voucher that you can swap each day for 2 fresh towels to use, retrieving the voucher upon return of the towels after use. The pool attendants were very helpful if you wanted to move a large umbrella or change the type of lounger you had.
Around the pool area is also a table tennis table, and a dart board, as well as a small children’s play area, and a beauty spa, whose personnel came around daily touting for business. To one side of the pool, there is an artist who paints and sells his paintings.

Entertainment
Every evening, in the pool area, there was a band who played live music, usually in a reggae style, even if the songs were not reggae songs. They were good musicians, and worked hard for the few claps the got after each number. Even during power cuts (which are a regular feature of the area) the drummer continued playing, which his ‘plugged in colleagues had to wait for the hotel’s generator to kick in soon after each power-cut.

Gardens
The gardens were regularly attended, with the lawns and hedging being nicely clipped. The plants were mostly labelled so you knew that the house plant you have at home can grow outdoors in the Gambia !

Cats
There is a group of similar cats (Bengal types with lovely markings) who seem to live within the gardens, mostly near the restaurant. They were very content to just sit and look at you eat, never begging for food. They seem very well looked after, and never bothered us. They are so lovely that you want to take them home. There were 4 kittens in the group, also well cared for.

Room cleaning
The rooms were generally cleaned without any problem However we did notice that there seemed to be one item that was not changed over each day, such as toilet paper or towels, so the house-maid needed to knock on your door around 5.30 to deliver the missing article, hoping for a tip.

Check-out
When we went to check-out, they was a heated discussion between a guest and the desk clerk about a missing towel voucher. The guest stated that the swimming pool attendant had lost his voucher at the beginning of their stay and had given him another room’s voucher (the voucher had your room number on it). The desk clerk said that failure to return the correct voucher given at the outset would incur a charge of some stupid amount. The guest said that it seemed like a scam to get people to pay a charge for the ‘error’. We had no such problem, but it is something to be aware of.

Lobby area.
This had the usual seats to lounge around in, as well as a bar in the corner and a guest relations desk. It is also the only place in the hotel where wi-fi is available (for free). There is a large flat-screen TV in a corner where people grouped to watch the football matches being shown.

To the front of the hotel there are shops that sell clothes (t-shirts and dresses), a small general store, a chemist, and a hairdresser.

Overall, this hotel purports to be a 5 star hotel, but in reality, by UK standards, it is a good 3.5 star hotel. There are definite shortcomings on offer (badly presented bathrooms, staff not ceding to guests at doorways, unnecessary visits by the maid touting for a tip, etc.), but the location compensates for such shortcomings, and the rooms are good enough not to upset too many people. However, the total Gambia experience outweighs any shortcomings this hotel may offer, and was a perfectly good place to base a holiday from. We were glad we went there.

“ Top Tip: Use the services of a member of the Gambian Birdwatchers Association, who wear a dark green shirt, and are based along the beach outside Ocean Bay Hotel (it's a desk under an umbrella!) They are not only birdwatchers, but will also arrange tours much cheaper than the likes of Thomas Cook, etc. We went in a group of 4, instead of 20-40 ! We had 3 fantastic trips to see birds and crocodiles, a day trip into Senegal, and to Lamin Lodge with a boat trip included amongst the mangroves.

“ A very pleasantly landscaped hotel with excellent food. The Gala Dinner which was prepared for us on New Year's Eve was superbly presented and the cost was included in our half-board - a rare occurrence as far as I'm concerned. The one frustrating thing about the hotel was the difficulty in getting minor problems in the room put right: the handbasin drained away terribly slowly, the outside light didn't work, there was no shade on the standard lamp and - most frustratingly of all - our keycard which gave us entry to the room stopped working at the same time as those of many other guests in the hotel. This meant that, whenever we wanted to go back to the room, we had to go first to Reception to wait for someone to come and let us in. This lasted for nearly 3 days - although the fault presumably lay with the company who had installed the system and had to put it right. Still, we had a lovely time and there were many delightful members of staff who made us feel very welcome.

“ Great hotel, the staff are fantastic, friendly, helpful and will always go out of their way to help. Good location too, nice and quiet with a big stretch of private beach.