Find Hotels in Pinnawala, Sri Lanka

Accomodation consisting of several stand alone villas with own shower/toilet. Central outdoor restaurant with reasonable day menu, Breakfast buffet was very average, food was cold and poor choice. Be prepared for a few insects during dinner in open restaurant. But nice atmosphere and surroundings makes it rather special if you are the outdoor type. Take some mozzie spray and give your villa a good spray after closing the doors to kill any stray mozzies lurking. Rooms have mozzie nets over beds too. One thing that really annoyed us was we booked a 3 bedroom villa and when we got there they had given it to someone else! This was even after we had confirmation several months before via Agoda. Apparently they only had one 3 bedroom villa and decided to give it to another guest...this is just an appaling practice and the hotel should be held accountable by Agoda or any other online booking company. It is quite common for some Sri Lankan hotels to dishonour confirmed bookings.

We stayed at the hotel one night to see the local attraction - the bathing elephants from the orphanage. This proved to be a very good decision - to visit the orphanage you need to buy pretty expensive tickets (20 USD per person), and they ask for the tickets even if you want to go to the riverside when the elephants are going there for bathing. With the hotel you have the best spot available to see the bathing elephants and you don't have to pay for the tickets of the orphanage. At the same time the quality of the room is pretty good, very clean, new and the size was also good. They have a great restaurant on the terrace with spectacular view on the river and the elephants and the selection is quite OK. However the prices are twice higher than normally in Sri Lanka. At the same time we weren't really satisfied with the staff at the hotel. We had a feeling that for everything they do they wanted to get money in reward, otherwise they wouldn't help. And when we asked some basic things from them (how to get to a railway junction in the near city to catch the train to Anuradhapura) none of them knew the answer, which was strange. Anyway, the location is very good and room was also great, so among other hotels near the elephant orphanage, I would definitely recommend this one.

The location of the hotel is simply awesome! It's practically next to the river where the elephants from the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage come to bathe everyday 10am to 12pm and 2pm to 4pm. We walked down to the river and was able to have very close encounters with the lovely creatures. The service is good too but no hair-dryer, no kettle, and only one towel was provided when we entered the room and another one was provided only upon request. The breakfast was pretty much the same as breakfast that we had at other hotels/hostels in sri lanka (fruit juice, scrambled eggs, toast, a pot of tea) but the toasts were too hard to swallow.

We were lucky to meet the owner as he was there at the resort. But I must say there was a mistake in the booking as we had clearly booked a room with 2 king/queen size beds. I showed the owner my booking details and he should me the confirmation sent to him by Agoda with no details of the beds. My wife, twin daughters of 4 years old and myself were made to sleep on one king size bed. This was not enough space and we didn't sleep the whole night and we had not slept in 48 hrs as it was our first night in Sri Lanka. What surprised me was that the entire resort was empty and 25 rooms available. This is communication mistake from Agoda or Owner and this is not unacceptable with my children with me.