Hotel Review: Le Méridien Ile Maurice (Mauritius)

After staying six nights at the Hilton Mauritius Resort & Spa which we loved (see my review here), we moved north for five nights to stay at the Le Méridien Ile Maurice (Ile Maurice is Mauritius).

When we first arrived at the Le Méridien, we had high hopes for our stay. The property looked lovely, our room initially seemed great, there was a long list of amenities shared while checking in and so we figured it would be a nice place to stay for five nights.

It sadly didn’t end up working out that way though. While it wasn’t a terrible stay, there were quite a few aspects of it that we didn’t enjoy, along with some frustrating elements, extremely bad bathroom design, poor service and a stretch of beach you wouldn’t want to swim in. By the end of our five days, we were happy to leave which most certainly wasn’t the case with the Hilton we’d stayed at before that. If it gives any sense of our five days there, the best part of staying at the Le Méridien Ile Maurice was eating at a restaurant each night which was a 10-15 minute walk away from the hotel.

Here’s a review of our stay at the Le Méridien Ile Maurice where I’ll share what we did and didn’t like about the resort.

Check-In

The road you drive in on to get to the hotel feels a little strange as the left hand side of the road is completely undeveloped, with a hotel lining the right side of the road. The hotel on the right is actually the Le Méridien – it stretches really far down the road.

Similar to our check-in experience at the Hilton Mauritius Resort & Spa, the Le Méridien Ile Maurice doesn’t have you check in while standing at the front desk.

Instead you take a seat at one of the sets of chairs in the lobby and a front desk agent comes over to check you in.

We were given some cold towels to freshen up, as well as a welcome drink of grapefruit and lemonade which was nice and refreshing.

The check-in process took longer than expected. They told us seemingly every possible thing we might need to know about our stay, but this wasn’t very helpful as they overwhelm you with far too much information. The Hilton did that to some extent, but they also had a QR code linking to a Google Drive folder online containing everything that we’d need to know for our stay and so we could easily refer to that. The Le Méridien didn’t have anything like that, so we had to return to the front desk a few times during our stay to double check some things.

During the check-in process we made clear that we were staying there for five days – three days were booked with free night certificates on my account and then two days with free night certificates on Shae’s account. We made sure to verify that we wouldn’t need to check back in on the fourth day; despite being told that we could stay in the same room, the front desk agent neglected to do whatever was necessary which caused issues later in our stay – more about that in the ‘Additional Complaints’ section later on (a review which has an ‘Additional Complaints’ section never bodes well 😉 )

Despite having Titanium status with Marriott, they didn’t bother giving any kind of room upgrade. To be (slightly) fair, I didn’t ask for one as I was concerned that they might put us in an upgraded room for three days, only to expect us to move for the final two days once we were on Shae’s reservation despite us both having Titanium status at the time. Still, the lack of any kind of proactive upgrade when the hotel seemed fairly empty set the tone for our entire stay.

Once we were checked in, the front desk agent walked us to our room. I say walk, but it was more of a hike and it felt like we could’ve walked back to the Hilton in the same amount of time despite it being an hour’s drive away! That’s one of the downsides to the layout of the Le Méridien Ile Maurice – it’s laid out over such a large area that depending on which room they put you in, you could end up being a very long distance from any of the hotel’s amenities.

As (bad) luck would have it, they put us in room 307 which is on the opposite end of the hotel to all of its amenities and activities, with the exception of the watersports hut.

About 5-10 minutes after we got to our room, our bags arrived. Sort of. The person bringing them in seemed to have no clue which bags were ours. He tried leaving some else’s backpack with us and wasn’t going to give us our two main suitcases until I highlighted that he hadn’t left those with us. The Le Méridien started as they meant to go on.

Deluxe Ocean View King, Guest room, 1 King

When entering our room, the bathroom was on the left and the bedroom straight ahead. The bathroom had two sets of sliding doors; one to enter from the entryway and one to enter from the bedroom.

The bedroom was a good size and I liked the decor. I didn’t think to get a photo, but there was a modem, router or Wi-Fi range extender attached to the ceiling above where I was standing to take the photo below. That meant the Wi-Fi was speedy which was useful, but its five bright green lights also lit up our room at night which wasn’t ideal.

We had a king bed which was comfortable. On the bed was a complimentary sarong and hat, along with a little bit of information about the property. The bedside tables each had a bottle of complimentary water on them. Those were supposed to be replaced by housekeeping each day, but that didn’t always happen.

I particularly liked the design of the bedside table on the right which was designed to look like luggage trunks.

To the right of the bed was a living area with a sofa, armchair and a couple of coffee tables.

On one of the coffee tables was a welcome gift of a bottle of red wine and some cookies.

Opposite the couch was a desk and chair, along with a fixed luggage rack and the room’s TV.

To the left of that was another cool-looking feature. There was what looked like an upright trunk which contained a safe, mini bar, tea and coffee making facilities and drinking glasses.

It looked like the previous guests got away with not having to pay for the half a bottle of wine they drank as that was still in the fridge. We let the front desk know about this so that they didn’t charge us for it.

Our room had a nice balcony looking out over the Indian Ocean.

There was a two-seater couch on one side…

…and a chair for one on the other.

The air conditioning in our room worked pretty well, although we did need to keep the overhead fan on to help with that.

On both sides of the bed there was an international power outlet and some light switch options.

There were further international power outlets as well as a couple of USB outlets by the desk which is a feature we appreciated

The Le Méridien Ile Maurice provides limited turndown service at night. If you’ve used your bed during the day, they’ll make it up again and leave a couple of chocolates, but they never actually turned down the bed.

Bathroom

While we liked the bedroom setup for the most part, the bathroom felt like it had been designed by someone who’d never stayed in a hotel before. For starters, the bathroom lights have to be turned on at the light switch panel in the entrance hallway. There aren’t any light switches in the bathroom itself, nor in the bedroom area. If you’re sitting on the couch and need to go to the bathroom, you therefore have to walk over to the hallway to turn the lights on and then go in to the bathroom. It’s a small inconvenience, but it was just a bizarre placement of the light switches.

The sliding doors to enter the bathroom were made of glass which might look nice at first glance.

The problem was that if you need to use the bathroom at night, you can’t turn any of the lights on without waking up another person in the room. There are two sets of bathroom lights – one set on the ceiling and one around the mirror. This is what it looks like from the bedroom when the mirror lights – which are the least bright of them – are turned on.

The bathroom had a bathtub on the left, a closet and double sinks on the right, a walk-in shower and separate alcove with a toilet. Once again, this was a bizarre design choice. The glass doors to enter the bathroom as well as the glass door for the toilet meant that anyone else in the room could sort-of see you using the toilet.

The closet contained an iron and ironing board, extra pillow, hairdryer, extra pillows, bath robes and slippers.

Even the closet wasn’t exempted from the bathroom weirdness. Both sides of the closets had lights in them without any discernible light switches. The only way to turn them off at night seemed to be to turn off the main master switch which turned off all lights in both the bedroom and bathroom.

The bathtub had a handheld showerhead. As you might be coming to expect based on my review so far, there was a problem with the bathtub. Shae took a bath during our stay and when draining it, it leaked a bunch of water all over the floor.

We had a bath mat for the floor on our first day, but housekeeping removed it after our first day and never bothered replacing it during the rest of the stay, so we had to make do with putting regular hand towels on the floor.

It was nice having two sinks. The design flaw with this section is that the makeup mirror on the left was kind of useless. It was mounted to the wall and wasn’t extendable, but they’d mounted it so far back that you had to lean far over the vanity to get close enough to see anything close up.

I was about to type ‘miracle of miracles, there wasn’t anything wrong with the toiletries.’ Except I just remembered there was. When housekeeping had made up the room before we arrived, they neglected to provide any hand soap and so we initially had to use the shower gel until they dropped off a bar of soap that evening.

I’ve already mentioned one aspect of toilet weirdness which is that any other guest in the room can see you even with both the toilet door and bathroom doors closed. Another annoying feature of the toilet “room” was that it was like a sauna in there when the door was closed.

The walk-in shower doesn’t get a pass from the annoyances either. There was both a rainfall showerhead and handheld showerhead, both of which worked well. There were shampoo, conditioner and shower gel dispensers mounted to the wall which were good.

The problem with the shower was that it leaked all over the bathroom floor. Although there was a lip at the bottom of the shower that was meant to keep the water in, it leaked out over the bathroom floor nonetheless. It didn’t matter how careful we were or how tight we tried pulling the shower door closed, it leaked A LOT. Drying that up wasn’t helped by the fact that housekeeping hadn’t bothered to replace the bath mat after our first night.

To make matters worse, the shower door was flat against the floor and it opened out. That meant it wasn’t possible to put a towel on the floor beforehand because opening the shower door pushed it far away from the leaked water.

Breakfast

On to breakfast where the frustrations continued. Breakfast is served in Nomad restaurant on the second floor opposite the lobby and it’s a lovely-looking restaurant. The problem is that the restaurant doubles up as the hotel’s sauna. It was so uncomfortably hot and sticky every single day that we were there. Even though the doors were opened, there’s no breeze that comes through.

The Le Méridien Ile Maurice has set up some freestanding fans in the restaurant, but they do nothing to keep you cool unless you stand right in front of one. The problem with the placement of the fans is that if you have any non-heavy food on your plate (e.g. prawn crackers), the fans will blow your food on to the floor if you walk past them which happened to me more than once.

There were several other downsides with breakfast. If there were clean drinking glasses, the water and fruit juice dispensers were empty. If there was water and fruit juice available to drink, there weren’t any drinking glasses available. If you are lucky enough to get a drinking glass, they’re barely larger than a shot glass and so you have to keep getting back up for a refill, crossing your fingers that someone has finally refilled the fruit and juice. Shae and I took to bringing a large bottle of water to breakfast with us to make sure we’d have something we could drink as we got tired of being thirsty first thing in the morning.

The Le Méridien Ile Maurice serves a buffet breakfast. Although there was an OK selection of food items, it wasn’t as extensive as the spread laid on at the Hilton we’d stayed at the previous week.

Even though it’s a buffet, an employee seats you when you first arrive. On four out of our five mornings, they put as at a dirty table, telling us to go and get some food and they’d have it ready by the time we got back. To be fair, it was ready by the time we’d gotten our food, but it smacked of disorganization that there were never any clean tables.

Nomad restaurant also has a bad fly problem, at least in the morning anyway. They can’t really do much about that other than having a handful of fan-type things sitting on select tables to help keep flies away, but it was unpleasant sitting there every morning with flies constantly landing on our face, arms and legs.

There are a couple of egg stations where you can get custom-ordered eggs, but it was a crapshoot as to whether there’d be a chef there to make them.

If you’d rather not sweat on to your food in their sauna restaurant, you can order room service breakfast. Here are the prices if you’d prefer to have breakfast that way.

Dinner

Before I get into the hotel’s dinner options, I want to highlight a better option. There’s a restaurant near the hotel called Sunset Filaos. It’s a 10-15 minute walk from the property, is much more reasonably priced than the hotel’s dining options and they serve incredibly tasty food. After eating at the hotel’s buffet on our first night, we decided to check out Sunset Filaos (here’s my review) on our second night and ended up having dinner there every single night after that – that’s how good it was! Here are walking directions from the hotel to Sunset Filaos – you can thank me later 😉

Anyway, on to dinner options at the hotel. As mentioned above, we ate at their buffet the first night and didn’t really enjoy the experience. The food was fine, although like their breakfast buffet their food selection didn’t seem quite as extensive as the Hilton’s.

There were two main reasons we didn’t enjoy our dinner. The first was the service. The person showing us to our table walked past empty tables where he could’ve seated us, took us through to a second room that’s also part of the restaurant. In there he went up to a double table setup where a couple was already sitting and pulled the second table away from them and put us there. They weren’t using that table, but it was super-awkward.

Dinner was a buffet, but drinks weren’t. Unfortunately no servers decided to stop by our table for 10-15 minutes, so we had to flag one down to ask for two bottles of still water. When the water eventually arrived, one bottle was still and one was sparkling.

This was also our first experience of eating in Nomad restaurant – the hotel’s second sauna. Because we’d been put in the second room at the back, there was even less air circulating as there didn’t seem to be any open doors or windows. I’d guess that it was at least 85°-90° in there – if not hotter – so we ate and ran.

The Le Méridien Ile Maurice has three other restaurants you can eat at, all of which have outdoor seating which at least means you’ll get some air. Those restaurants are Paparazzi, Zoli Mamzel and Kumin, but we didn’t eat at any of those as we loved the Sunset Filaos restaurant nearby so much.

You can also order lunch and dinner through room service; here’s the menu.

Zoli Mamzel runs a ‘Barefoot Night’ once a week. We didn’t experience this, but my cynicism about the hotel having stayed there suggests that you’ll be paying a lot for ‘light salads, small plates and grilled delicacies”.

Sundowners Cocktail

The Le Méridien Ile Maurice offers a complimentary sundowners cocktail from 6pm-7pm, although I think this is only for people with Titanium status in the Marriott Bonvoy program. The Hilton Mauritius Resort & Spa offered something similar for Diamond members, but the Hilton’s version was far superior.

The Hilton cocktail voucher could be used at any time of the day rather than only from 6pm-7pm. You could also redeem it for any cocktail you liked, whereas the Le Méridien makes a different cocktail each day for sundowners and you get what you’re given. If you don’t like gin on a day where that’s the liquor in the cocktail, you’ll just have to order a different drink that you’ll have to pay for.

They also have small canapes which were OK, but far less generous than the full-sized appetizers given to Diamond members at the Hilton.

While service at the bar where these were served was sometimes very good, other times it wasn’t. One night when we arrived for our complimentary cocktail, we told the person we were there for sundowners and gave him our room number. He then double checked our room number and then asked if we were actually supposed to be there which was kind of rude.

Beach

On the face of it, the Le Méridien Ile Maurice has a nice-looking beach with a pier from which they launch some of the watersport activities.

Compared to the Hilton, there wasn’t much shade on the beach itself. The ocean is also zero fun to swim in. A few feet from the shore there’s a large section of rocks and possibly coral in the water, many of which are quite sharp to walk on. It might not be quite so bad if you have water shoes, but this stretch of beach isn’t one you’ll want to go swimming in for the most part. I did once and that was it – it was too painful walking in and out. Trying to swim in and out rather than walking didn’t help much as that section is so shallow, my knees would drag on the sharp rocks.

Amenities & Activities

The hotel has three swimming pools. The main pool has a lot of sun loungers around it, as well as a swim-up bar.

Somewhat inexplicably (but in keeping with the overall theme of our stay), there’s a cabana where you get your towels but it isn’t next to any of the swimming pools.

The middle swimming pool has some fun hammocks you can lay in that also put you in the water to help keep you cool.

The third pool is their Nirvana pool which is adults-only. This also has a bar next to it.

The bar next to the Nirvana pool is where we were able to get free soft drinks throughout the day. I think that’s a benefit for members with Titanium (and possibly Platinum) status, but I lost track of all that information that was given at check-in.

We got to the Nirvana bar early one night, so Shae got a cocktail before the sundowners cocktail and I tried a beer from a Mauritian brewery.

Between some of the swimming pools there are cabanas available.

The hotel has a spa on site where you can get all kinds of treatments.

In our room there was a leaflet listing the extensive range of treatments, but they don’t bother to provide you with any pricing details unless you specifically ask. I know I’m doing a lot of comparisons with the Hilton on the island, but the Hilton provided both a list of available treatments and their prices which makes it much more convenient to make decisions about treatments.

The spa is also home to the hotel’s whirlpool and official sauna (not counting Nomad restaurant and our toilet room). We didn’t make use of either, but we could see down to the whirlpool from one of the walkways. Both the whirlpool and sauna are free for all guests to use; it’s only spa treatments for which there’s a fee.

The hotel has a good-sized fitness room that’s very well equipped.

For other fitness options there’s a tennis court…

…and bikes you can use.

One of the nice features of the hotel is that they have a number of complimentary water activities available including snorkeling, water skiing and a glass-bottom boat tour. We got unlucky with the weather while we were there; it was rainy and the waves were rough, so they had to cancel all those activities.

Unaffected by the rain was an indoor games area just off the lobby. I’d rather have had this be out in the rain though; because it was enclosed away from any windows and doors, this section was stiflingly hot and humid – the hotel’s third unofficial sauna.

For younger children there’s a playground and, I think, some kind of kids club.

In addition to the poolside bars, there’s a bar opposite the lobby called Latitude 20.

In our room was a coupon for a free coffee from Latitude 20 during our stay. While it was nice that they give you a free coffee, it simultaneously felt a little cheap for them to only offer one coffee per room, rather than one coffee per room for up to two adults. Shae and I don’t like coffee and so it was no skin off our nose, but it felt like another example – like the sundowners cocktails – where they’ll only be generous to a limited extent.

Something you do get for two people is a coupon for two free entries to L’Aventure du Sucre, a museum in a former sugar factory that tells the history of sugar on the island. It’s an extremely interesting museum, so it’s worth taking advantage of this coupon if you do happen to stay at the Le Méridien Ile Maurice.

Additional Complaints

Please indulge me in some further complaining; partly because it’s cathartic for me, but also because I want to give a better idea of some of the other issues we encountered at the hotel.

Staying in the same room

I mentioned towards the beginning of the review that we made it clear when we were checking in that we had two separate reservations – one for three days in my name and one for two days in Shae’s name. We were assured that everything was taken care of, that we could stay in our room, etc. On our fourth day there, we were out most of the day doing an excursion we’d booked on Viator. Upon returning that evening, we walked all the way to the end of the hotel where our room was, only to find our key didn’t work. We walked all the way back to the lobby, with housekeeping along the way asking why all our stuff was still in our room.

When getting to the front desk we explained the situation and the employee asked us to take a seat and she’d be over once she’d finished what she was working on. When she’d finished that, rather than coming to us, she helped another guest. I went back over and she told me to take a seat and she’d be over, only for her to then help another guest. In the end we just stood in line again rather than taking a seat. She told us that they’d tried calling us all day, but what she presumably meant was that they tried calling our room. We had our phones on us all day and had 4G LTE signal the entire time, so I’m not sure why they kept calling our room rather than my phone number they had on file when it was clear that we weren’t in our room.

Golf carts

Several employees use golf carts to get around the hotel, but they just drive as fast as they like wherever they like, expecting guests to move off walkways so they can have priority.

Dangerous walking surfaces

One of the biggest issues was one we only noticed because it rained for much of our time there. The hotel has used tile flooring for its outdoor walkways which is great in theory, but hazardous when it rains. It made the walkways very slippery, with water pooling in stairwells making it even more dangerous. Being at the opposite end of the hotel to everything meant we often had to walk along these sections which, being in our early 40s, wasn’t a huge issue, but we had to be careful nonetheless. If we had less mobility, it would’ve been much more worrying.

Housekeeping not coming

One of the switches on the panel by our room’s entrance door had a ‘Do Not Disturb’ function and another requested housekeeping. A couple of times during our stay we requested housekeeping and despite being out for many hours, no one came by. Even when housekeeping did come by, a couple of times they didn’t leave any more bottles of water which they’re supposed to; that’s an issue because you can’t drink the tap water in Mauritius. We ended up relying on water we bought at the store to ensure we had enough to drink.

Housekeeping entering when they shouldn’t

On our first morning I woke up at about 8am and was looking at stuff on my phone when our door suddenly opened. We had our ‘Do Not Disturb’ button pressed, but even if that wasn’t on, no one should have walked in without even bothering to knock. The guy asked if we were checking out that day even though we’d only checked in the day before. It was the fact that he just let himself in which was of most concern as housekeeping are supposed to at least knock first and, being awake, I know for sure he didn’t do that. I also don’t know why you’d be checking at 8:30am if guests have checked out yet when the checkout time is 12pm.

Unhelpful front desk

We stopped by the front desk several times to find out some information, try to book a rental car, book a taxi, find out where amenities were, etc. Quite frequently the front desk staff either didn’t seem particularly interested in helping or told us incorrect information (e.g. where you go to borrow the bikes). There were a few exceptions, but overall we had consistently poor service.

Pet Policy

The Le Méridien Ile Maurice isn’t a pet-friendly hotel.

Service

As mentioned in probably too much detail in this review, service at the hotel was poor. There were some bright spots though. At the Nirvana bar, Akshay and Brian were lovely and friendly. Jaysen at the front desk was helpful and Riteesh in the breakfast buffet area was incredibly hardworking and seemed to always be seeking to find some way to serve guests while they dined.

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi at the Le Méridien Ile Maurice is complimentary for all guests and was one of the few good things about our stay. While the Wi-Fi at the Hilton was a little slow, it was much more speedy at the Le Méridien.

Check-In & Check-Out Times

Check-in at the Le Méridien Ile Maurice is at 3pm, while check-out is at 12pm.

Location

The hotel is in Pointe aux Piments, about 25 minutes north of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. It’s about 15 minutes from L’Aventure du Sucre, the botanical gardens in Pamplemousses, Grand Baie and Trou-aux-Biches where we were able to go swimming with sea turtles.

Parking

Self-parking is free at the Le Méridien. I don’t think they offer valet parking.

Cost

We booked our stay using free night certificates. Four of those were from Marriott credit cards we own – you get a free night certificate when paying the annual fee at renewal each year. The cards we have give certificates good at properties costing up to 35,000 points per night, with the ability to top them up with up to 15,000 points per night if award nights cost more than that. We were fortunate that the first four nights cost 34,000 points per night, while the fifth cost 35,000 points, so we didn’t need to top up with any points. For the other night, we used a free night certificate good at properties costing up to 40,000 points that I selected as my Choice benefit when earning Titanium status last year.

The cash rate for our stay would’ve been $332 per night, so we got good value from our certificates seeing as the annual fees on our Marriott cards range from something like $89-$125 depending on the card.

Final Thoughts

Shae and I had a disappointing stay at the Le Méridien Ile Maurice. The property has potential because our bedroom was nicely designed, they provide value by offering all kinds of complimentary watersports and the swimming pools are lovely.

Those positive features are let down by all kinds of other aspects. With a bathroom that’s poorly designed in every way, mediocre (at best) service, incredibly uncomfortable temperatures in both the main restaurant and games area, inconsistent housekeeping, housekeeping entering our room first thing in the morning without knocking, no proactive room upgrade, dangerous walking conditions in the rain and much more, I can’t recommend that people stay at this hotel. I’m sure other people have perfectly fine experiences and I certainly wouldn’t argue that, but I can only judge the hotel based on our experience and by the end of our stay we couldn’t wait to get to our next hotel.

Our Rating

Room = 3.6 / 5 (the bedroom gets much higher marks, the bathroom dragged the score down)
Hotel Amenities = 4.5 / 5
Food = 3.6 / 5 (the food was OK, but the unpleasant temperature of the restaurant marked it down too)
Location = 3.8 / 5
Service = 2.3 / 5
Overall Value = 3.5 / 5

Total = 3.55 / 5

Address

Le Méridien Ile Maurice, Village Hall Lane, Pointe aux Piments 21304, Mauritius

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