Centara Grand Beach Resort & Villas Krabi

I seldom get a massage, so when I usually do I want to have a great experience. We saw this massage service when we checked in to Centara Grand Hotel. My partner wants to have a massage and we booked a 90 min session. My massage therapist Da did a great job and i felt very relaxed once finished. We will definitely return for next time and also recommend this to our friends when they visit the hotel. Read less

We recently stayed here for one week out of our 17 days in Thailand in their ‘Premium Oceanview King’ room instead of their basic “Deluxe King” room The hotel is about a half km (.3mi) from Ao’Nang beach, but it can’t be accessed by road. The base of a mountain coming down into the ocean between the resort and Ao’ Nang blocks any road access! There are only two ways to get here from outside the resort! They have a complementary hotel shuttle boat that will take you to the public Nopparat Thara Per, which about 3km up the beach. (This is the public pier where ferry’s, boat tour operators, fishing charters and lot of the tour groups do their pick-ups and drop-offs, too.) The other option is to walk the “Monkey Trail” which is a very steep and potentially hazardous walk up some rickety wooden stairs with bamboo railings and high drops offs and cliffs for about 100m up and five minutes walking, and then another five minutes down the other side where you’ll come out on the south end of Ao’nang Beach. You’ve got to be in reasonably good shape to go this route! If you’re not careful, you could easily fall down the stairs or slip through the steps and snap a leg or worse. It’s a pretty strenuous walk, even while it’s short because of the repressive Thai heat and humidity. There are supposed to be monkeys on the walkway, but we didn’t see any the entire week we were there. It only took about 10 minutes to walk over the hill using the trail, so we used that instead of waiting for the boat most days when we left the hotel grounds. (I think the hotel boat runs every hour and a half until 11 PM, and they recommend making a reservation.) Definitely not handicapped accessible at this resort. As you need to be able to board their speedboat to come over here from the pier. You have to climb up a little ladder into the front of the boat from ankle deep shallow water. The monkey trail would be completely out of the question. And once you arrive, there are no elevators and long walks up hills and more long stairs to access rooms. Once you get to your building, there are more stairs if you’re not on the ground level floor! Wasn’t a problem for us, but I thought I should make note because this place would be impossible to stay for anybody with a serious physical mobility issue, say somebody in a wheelchair or somebody who cant walk. I’m not sure how they would even get them onto the boat? The resort is situated in a little cove, with a scenic beach surrounded by huge cliffs dropping straight off 300m+ (900 ft) The beach is essentially private, but the public is allowed access. They’re just not allowed to come off the beach and use the hotel facilities unless they pay for a day pass. The grounds and pool area were completely gorgeous. Nicely manicured gardens and yards. All the public areas of the hotel were spectacular! There was a small pool over in front of their Thai restaurant away from the main pool, which we didn’t even discover for a few days. We found that usually nobody was in it, and we didn’t have to deal with the screaming, splashing kids and crowds hogging all the chairs over the primary pool. All pools are supposed to close at nine, but we used them late at night and nobody ever told us we couldn’t be in them. That was great because we’re usually out during the day and want to take a dip when we get back late at night after a long hot day out. The room was basically clean, good size, large balcony and comfortable king bed with high thread count linenrs, but there were some issues considering this place bills itself a five star resort. i’d only give the room 3- 3.5 star rating, but the resort itself a five star. The room was as advertised, as direct ocean view. They didn’t lie, because if you look out the balcony, you’re looking straight at the ocean. However, the top of a large palm tree directly in front of our room blocked almost any view of the ocean. No USB ports installed in room to plug in all of our smart phones, tablets, cameras. The wood flooring in room was very scratched up. There were too many dings and dents in the wooden room furniture, closet doors and even the balcony. railings were dinged up. Two large stains on the patio furniture cushions. Cushions old and sun faded. The little room which the toilet was in off the main bathroom was a bit offputting with lots of stains and unknown splatter on the walls around the toilet. When we looked under the lid, what we saw was grotesque! It’s like they hadn’t scrubbed that toilet in a couple years! Yuck! Also, over the toilet was a large segment of marble counter section. For some reason it had been recently replaced, and they just had sloppily cut a chunk of marble out of another room and sloppily caulked the piece back in place over the toilet. A real half assed job for a 5-Star hotel. Also, I had some significant and very annoying issues trying to book a room at this resort from the USA. I was trying to book directly with the hotel through their website. All three of my US issued credit and debit cards were not processing when I’d try to make the reservation. Every time I got to the part where I put my card details in, I kept getting a “hash error” message from Bank of Bangkok and message the booking wouldn't complete. When I contacted my card issuers, they couldn’t even see any of the attempted transactions Ilwhich had tried about 10 times on my cards. I had to stay up late and make a long distance call to Thailand to the hotel front desk in the middle of the night because of a 12 hour time difference from the USA and make a reservation the old fashion way by phone. The day we arrived we were warmly welcomed. We did realize we were hours early and it was only 12pm. However, the lady who was checking us in told us without our asking that our room would be ready early and it would be ready by 1pm. Thrilled, we waited around in the sweltering sun on the beach until 1pm,but the room still wasn’t ready until 3:30pm. So we just sat out there we just sat out there and sweltered. Not a huge deal, but if the room wasn’t going to be ready early, I wish she wouldn't have told us at noon that it would be ready early when we didn't even ask. We waited because we thought it was only going be an hour. Not 3 1/2 hours. Overall, I really liked the property and it’s secluded quiet private location. A very nice place. Especially for a romantic getaway and beach sunsets. Just some issues with the room showing some needs for a little overhauling. Everything else was exceptional! Service was excellent and the on-site restaurants were pretty affordable by American standards. They would probably be considered expensive in Thailand, but none of our hotel meals cost more than $30-35 US for two, even after VAT and 10% service charge add-ons. There or three or four different restaurants to eat on site. Read less