Considerable decline from when we stayed at the hotel the last time around
We have been staying with the Fairmont in Ajman since the hotel was opened in 2016. All in all, this was our 8th stay at the hotel, and we have seen the services decline year over year, but compared to our last stay in 2019, the drop was considerable.
The main problem is the food: we paid for the full board, but we found that the food was terrible. I remember that the Spectrum restaurant used to have a nice assortment of Asian dishes, Indian ones and then some European ones. Now, there was only one spicy chicken plate on the Asian side, only two dishes on the Indian side, and even the salad bar was poor (for example the egg-plant caviar we liked was uneatable because it was only vinegar inside). The only meat available was chicken in all its forms. Worse still, the plates were the same each day: each day the same spicy chicken which was luke warm and left there, the same indian plates and the same assortements.
Gone are the days when we used to be able to eat sushi and sashimi at the Asian station, or tandoor skewers at the Indian side or fish dishes on the European side.
The staff at the restaurant were ignorant: they would not even let you pass when you were going back to your table with a plate of food - which may be considered a base guest courtesy. Further, even the staff we talked to complained that the food was terrible, and that their was even worse.
Even when we discussed with management (Ivana) the situation, what they proposed was to upgrade our spending quota for the Turkish restaurant (which we did appreciate), but here too we had kind of the same thing every night.
In the room things were no different: we come the first night after a lengthy 7 hour flight, we find the hot water does not work in a 5* hotel. They get it fixed the next day. The shower head of the shower in the bathroom is broken - we indicate this, they switch the one from the shower with the one from the bathtub - lucky we did not want to use both. The handle bar to fix the shower was broken: the fix was to stick a wooden peg inside to stop the shower head from falling down on the handle bar :(.
The AC in the room would not turn off even if we turned it off from the controls, even if it said OFF, it would still run. Another call to engineering and we were shown how to manually disconnect the circuit breaker from the electric panel - not that I mind doing that, but in a 5 star hotel, this should not happen.
We have been coming back to the hotel for 8 times in a row because we liked the accommodations, the location and the beach. However after the current experience, I am sad to say, I will consider that this may have been the last time I will travel to the Fairmont Ajman.