Shangri-La Hotels in Kota Kinabalu

The hotel and grounds are stunning! Beautiful pools and nice beach. The hotel room (Garden superior) was nice- with a big balcony. Water, coffee, insect repellant etc was refilled daily which was a nice touch. Daily cleaning was wonderful. The breakfast was perfect - Western and local choices- but trying to get coffee was terrible- long queues and unreliable coffee machines. Most days I skipped it and bought coffee from the pool bar. Happy hour 4-6pm daily is great with regular entertainment- fire shows and tribal dancing. Bar prices are obviously very high - £45 for a bottle of cheap wine. The biggest problem with this hotel is very slow service (hard working staff but not enough to serve the guests) The staff work super long hours so I felt bad complaining when I was waiting 45 mins for drinks each day. Also, all the restaurants stop serving food around 9.30pm then everywhere closes around 10.30pm which means the evenings can be quite boring- especially when there’s nowhere else to go as the hotel is far from anywhere. The spa is overpriced but I enjoyed my facial and hot oil treatment. My last gripe is the hotel day trips- absolutely appalling. The hotel is affiliated with Sabah travel company- poor communication, poor service, hugely overpriced and generally very bad. I recommend booking day trips through Trip.com instead of through the hotel. Allen the hotel supervisor was amazing trying to sort out the fiasco and I’m grateful- but I wasn’t offered a refund or compensation which is disappointing. I wanted to leave a poor review on the Sabah Travel’s website but they removed my booking so it wasn’t possible. I’d stay at this hotel again as the price is fairly reasonable but it def falls below the usual Shangri-la standards.

It's quite a large resort. It's not close to the city center, so we switched here after staying two nights downtown. It's very close to the airport. You could easily spend a whole day at the hotel; there's a pool, a beach, a gym, a card room, and even movies to watch. A nice touch is that they have different activities all day long, which both adults and kids can enjoy. They also gave us a complimentary teddy bear.