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Review #6: Hotel Aroha, Tagaytay, Philippines

The Hotel's main entrance
My mom was in town this week since we were going to attend a cousin's wedding. I have decided that we should just book accommodations near the wedding venue/reception so we won't have any problems caused by traffic jams. The wedding was going to be held in San Antonio de Padua Parish Church in Silang, Cavite. I opted to book our accommodations in nearby Tagaytay. Browsing AGODA for suitable hotels in the area (read: cheap but accessible), I have settled for one that is just along the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay Rd. The hotel's name is Hotel Aroha and I have booked their Imperial Room which is the room that can accommodate 4 adults.
The lounge and front desk area
The location of the hotel is very convenient due to its close proximity to famous attractions in Tagaytay, and at the same time, it is just near the junction going to Silang (where the two venues for the wedding ceremony and reception are located). The immediate area is also not very busy and is relatively quiet. There's spacious parking at the back and it just so happened that our room was on the ground floor so it was just a few steps away from where we parked the car in case we needed to get something. There are not many things to do walking distance away but that should not be a problem if you have transportation.

The dining area is also located in front
The room came with complimentary breakfast for 2. Nothing special but no complaints either. One thing to note is that even if our room was for 4, the complimentary breakfast provided was only for 2 people. This is not really a problem since the breakfast menu items were affordable.

The additional parking space at the back
No in room mini-ref. No in-room safe. Very basic rooms. No complimentary bottled water in the room but you do have the option to go to the lobby and use the water cooler there. The hotel provides toiletry packs which contain a toothbrush, a small packet of toothpaste, a packet of shampoo. They also provided coffee making facilities inside the room (electric kettle and instant coffee). Based on our experience, it may not be their policy to clean the rooms daily (perhaps if you request for it but we did not specifically request) but you can always request fresh towels and they will deliver them to your room right away.

The ground floor hallway (just beside the parking lot at the back)
The beds were adequately comfortable and so are the pillows provided. There was WiFi but the signal can be a bit spotty when you are inside the room (the nearer you are from the reception area the better the signal becomes). Bandwidth was fairly low but at least it was stable (did not disconnect often).

Back parking lot
Very friendly and accommodating staff. Requests for extra blankets and ironing equipment were quickly accommodated. I even requested the hotel staff to refrigerate a container of fresh produce for me. Overall we had a very pleasant time interacting with everybody in the hotel.

The view from the main road

Something odd happened during our second day of stay in the hotel. One of our companions opted to stay in the room when the rest of us went somewhere. After about 30 minutes, the electricity in the room went out The common areas had electricity and it was just our room that had none. I suspect that they thought that nobody was there in the room and they were trying to conserve electricity (or they thought that we left the air conditioning on). We went back to pick him up for lunch and found a dark room with him not bothering to report the incident to the hotel staff (he was still busy doing work on his laptop which still had plenty of battery). Everything was back to normal when we came back a few hours later.

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