Monday, June 11, 2012

Hotel Palacio, Zona Colonial, Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic

Grade: B+

The Boutique Hotel Palacio in Santo Domingo's Zona Colonial is a 3-star hotel, and its bathrooms - at least in the so-called "Superior Rooms" - reflect such a rating. They are bright, attractive, practical and comfortable. They come with faux-marble wall and floor tiles, open shower stalls with hand showers, and two toilet flushing options for conserving water. There are phones mounted on the walls beside the toilets, I assume for making phone calls while sitting on the toilet. The restrooms also offer butt hoses - Is that what they're called? I'm calling them butt hoses - for the hosing off of butts. And please see the photo of the decoratively folded spare toilet paper roll. Wow.

So these are A+ restrooms, right? Not quite. Notice I've been speaking of the facilities in the plural. We started off in one room, but woke one morning to find an ever-expanding pool of water in front of the sink. The ceiling was dripping water. We reported it, and the issue was somehow fixed within an hour (we suspect they may have shut off a valve somewhere). The next morning, the leak was back and the ceiling was dripping in even more places. They promptly moved us to a new room, with a bigger restroom and an automatic faucet where our previous room had a manual one. This mess and inconvenience was enough to knock the restrooms down a full letter grade.

(Please note the photos below are of the second, larger, restroom.)