Sannot Riverside Boutique Hotel

Very good food at an affordable price. Rooms are nice and clean. Just beside Ping River. Lovely garden.

Very comfortable hotel, the landscape is good, the waiter is very thoughtful.

We really enjoyed our stay at Sannot. We stayed in the one bedroom suite with garden view. Really nice size split across a lounge, the bedroom with its own lounge area, and large private bathroom, plus a nice large balcony. Decor was good, full size fridge (stocked on day one, no charge for consumption). A good location (for us) as well - a five to ten minute ride from the main tourist centres in Chiang Mai itself, but with the relative peacefulness of being located on the riverside. I would ordinarily rank a property like this as four out of five - so why the drop to three? Sannot is apparently owned by an (on-site) Chinese family. Nothing wrong with that, but clearly their focus is on getting in and servicing Chinese guests. The only TV channels were those available via a satellite TV box - which only had Chinese channels. There was a simple (but lovely to enjoy) outdoor sitting area, populated with Chinese board games and Chinese novels, with Chinese signs hung up. Their breakfast offering - simple but tasty - only changed for the Chinese offering: a different option each day, no variety otherwise (although the staff were helpful and did chop and change it up for me when I talked with them). There's talk of a bar, but all we could find was a fridge in the breakfast area, which isn't manned during the day - so you would have to head off and find someone (far easier, and no doubt cheaper, to stock your fridge via 7-Eleven (which is what we did). And then the killer, on checkout, they produced a photo of a hand-towel from our room that housekeeping had apparently tried to wash but a couple of stains couldn't be removed. 500 THB please. They couldn't accurately explain what day the towel had been taken from our room, or what they had done to try and clean it, or indeed show us how this particular towel was definitely from our room. We simply said no, didn't accept it, and by all accounts this can be a tactic some establishments use to generate additional income. They didn't react well to me telling them that there was no way I was paying 500 THB for a second-hand towel, and if I did have to pay them something then I was keeping the towel. With strong enough rebuttals they backed down - read into that what you will. Would we stay there again? Before the towel accusation, it would have been an 80% yes we would. Now it would be 50/50.