Name: Friends Guesthouse Negombo
Address: 39 Rosary Road, Negombo, Negombo, Negombo, 11500, Sri Lanka
Rating: 8

Air conditioning

24-hour reception

Smoking areas

Smoke-free property

Ticket assistance

Express check-in/check-out

Garden

Terrace

Private check-in/check-out

Outdoor furniture

No elevators

General

Non-smoking rooms

Room service

Hairdryer

Shower/Bathtub

Shower

Rooms

Ironing

Laundry

Dry-cleaning

Luggage storage

Services and amenities

Diet menu (on request)

Breakfast

Breakfast in the room

Vending machine

Packed Lunches

Bottled water

Meals

Free Wi-Fi

Internet

Area shuttle

Car rental

Transfer services

Transfer

English

Languages Spoken

Tour assistance

Tourist services

Bike rental

Fishing

Sun Deck

Recreation

No parking

Parking

Beach/pool towels

Pool and beach

Cycling

Snorkelling

Sports

Pets Not Allowed

Pets

Location

At the hotel

Room amenities

Bandaranaike International Airport

Friends Guesthouse Negombo

Negombo

child-bed

child-bed-fee

external-private-bathroom

private-bathroom

shared-bathroom

10-beds

11-beds

12-beds

13-beds

14-beds

15-beds

16-beds

17-beds

18-beds

19-beds

2-beds

20-beds

21-beds

22-beds

23-beds

24-beds

25-beds

26-beds

27-beds

28-beds

29-beds

3-beds

30-beds

31-beds

32-beds

33-beds

34-beds

35-beds

36-beds

37-beds

38-beds

39-beds

4-beds

40-beds

5-beds

6-beds

7-beds

8-beds

9-beds

king-bed

queen-bed

limited-time

lounge

treatment

no-window

bay-view

bosphorus-view

canal-view

city-view

courtyard-view

garden-view

golf-view

harbour-view

inland-view

lake-view

land-view

mountain-view

ocean-front

ocean-view

oceanside

panoramic-view

park-view

partial-ocean-view

partial-sea-view

partial-view

pool-view

river-view

sea-front

sea-view

street-view

sunrise-view

sunset-view

water-view

with-view

annex

basement

main-building

1-bedroom

2-bedrooms

3-bedrooms

4-bedrooms

5-bedrooms

6-bedrooms

not-guaranteed

wired-internet-access

smoking

sauna

duplex

safe

mini-bar

breakfast-for-1

breakfast-for-2

pets-allowed

wi-fi

kitchen

Family run, very friendly folks, and the rooms are really nice, except that they don't have a mini-fridge.  Everything else is available though, and the rates are really low!  The location is excellent, a 3 minute to the beach!  Highly recommended!

Very nice rooms!

This guest house is awful, it has very rude staff and the rooms are dirty. There is no warm water, even though I booked a room with warm water. And the AC in my room that I paid for did not work. I will never go back here. I was here last year and then it was good but now it has totally changed. The staff only sit all day and are grumpy, the owner is never there and the breakfast is the worst I have ever had with old white bread and disgusting coffe. The streets outside feels very dangerous, there are drunk young men screaming at you when you go outside. The bed sheets and towels smell old sweat and are dirty. Nothing is good about this place. DO NOT GO HERE! 

Awful!

There are 3 reasons why I would recommend you to stay away from Friend's Guesthouse: The staff, the location, and the construction work.

THE STAFF
For some reason unknown to man, the owner has put a gang of self-assured, moody and grumpy young girls in charge of this operation. They behave like they have done the world a huge favour by setting up this guesthouse, and that we should be thankful that they let us stay with them. They have absolutely no idea how to run a professional hotel. We had so many issues during our 4 day stay, and at every single turn we were treated with such disrespect and out right anger that it left us completely baffled. I would like to go through all the incidents here, but there are just too many - so here are some highlights:

* The breakfast was tiny, seeing that they charge almost 500 for it. We only got a few pieces of stale white bread, a tiny omelette and a glass of juice. When we asked if this was it, we only got a grumpy "yes". Not "would you like anything else", or "can we improve it somehow, so that you might buy breakfast with us for the remainder of you stay". We also informed them that the bread tasted old, cheap and stale. To this they replied that it was not the cheapest bread you could find on the island, so we should be happy. To no surprise, we took our breakfast business elsewhere for the rest of our stay. 
* According to booking.com, the guesthouse provide a daily maid service. So when no cleaning had taken place on our second day, I enquired about this. One of the grumpy girls told me they only cleaned every second day. When I showed her the website where it says cleaning every day, she just said "well some people don't like that we go into their rooms".  I really don't get these people! They always have some ridiculous excuse for not doing their job! Later we basically had to beg and drag them up to our room to get them to empty the trash and swipe the sand of the floor. The cleaning for the remainder of our stay was also way under par.
* Booking.com also state that the guesthouse has a laundry service, so I brought my laundry to the reception. I was now informed that they did not have a laundry service. When I showed her the information on the website (I have NO IDEA why she had not familiarised herself with this information after my earlier complaints), she said that the room rate was discounted (due to this being low-season), so there was no laundry for me! How is that even relevant?! I was having none of it, and asked her to just take care of it. Later that day, I was informed that the laundry was ready. In the reception I found two bags packed with my soaking wet (!!!) clothes! I asked what I was supposed to do with these, and was told I could hang them up myself. Seeing that the clothes reeked after having been in a bag for several hours, I asked them to wash them again. The next time I got them back, the clothes were not only wet, but also full of white lint from their towels as well as lumps of washing powder. The manager was around so I asked to talk to him. Now if I thought the girls were rude, this guy just blew me away! He yelled that he didn't want to talk to me and that if I wanted my clothes washed, I could use the laundry down the road. 

In general, every complaint was met with the same response: "No one has complained about this before". Where is the logic in that?! Just because, say, the first 20 guest don't complain about something, does that somehow make them immune against future complaints? But I guess it just goes to show the intelligence, common sense and customer service behind this joke of an operation.

Every single day was lined up with these kinds of incidents. Staying at Friend's felt like an up-hill battle, where you had to fight for everything. We left feeling completely drained of energy.

I really don't understand how these people think they can run a guesthouse, in an increasingly competitive market, with this level of unprofessionalism! This is truly the worst hotel experience I've had in my life. These people single handedly managed to ruin our stay in Negombo. If you want to be treated with respect, I suggest you find somewhere else to stay! 

THE LOCATION
The guesthouse is located in a very low-income street. All the other houses are falling apart, and the area is full of trash. The street goes completely dark at night, and there are vile men around eying you up and down while hollering at you and generally being very dis-respectful. 
The guesthouse is in the south end of Negombo. The beach here is in worse shape than the north end. The beach and the sea is full of trash. Even finding a place to lie down is a struggle, because everything is covered in rubbish. All the nicer restaurants and shops are also further north. Therefore, you are better off staying 1-2 km further up the road. 

CONSTRUCTION WORK
They are adding a 2nd floor to the guesthouse as we speak. During our stay, there were men hauling building materials back and forth, through out balcony, all the time. It looks like it's going to be a noisy next few months!

HORRIBLE STAY! HORRIBLE STAFF!

The guesthouse was quite hard to find, since it is located far from the city centre in the middle of quite strange neighbourhood, with bad smell in around the house. The beach was pretty close, only like 400m, but that part was really dirty, would be really afraid to be lying there. 
On the other hand, the family, that is running the house, was super friendly and even though they didn't speak briliant english, we were able to set up everything and they even helped us out with next arrangements. The room was small, but very cozy and clean, which we really appreciated.

Cozy but poor-located

We stayed there only one night in between two long flights and we booked an AC room one week before we arrived there. When we arrived it turned out that the room was not available and the hotel did not even have our reservation.  We already paid for it in advance!!

The hotel employee gave us the keys to the room and it turned out that the room had just a fan. It was us that had to come back to her and remind that we booked AC room. She did not check it or ingrmored it.

It was already late and we did not feel like changing the place as we were catching a flight next day. It was a mistake!! We should have just searched for another hotel. We got a room with a fan. The fan worked but it did not give any wind. They just celaned the room with a strong detergent that gave a terrible smell. We ended up with the doors open not to suffocate. The room was on the ground floor so we had to keep our bag with us in the bed - it did not feel safe there. Anyway that was not necessary as I did not sleep at all. Due to all the noise outside (barking dogs and motorcycles, which is for sure possible to survive when the door and window is closed) ) it was impossible to sleep. So what was supposed to be a good night sleep place turned out to be a long night in a hot room without a single minute of sleep. 

The employee did not really seem to be too concerned about the situation. She did offer that they will pay back the difference between the AC and non AC. 

We were suprised that this place had such good reviews on the TripAdvisor. We would not recommed it.!!!

Friends Guesthouse Negombo

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