Overall Ratings & Reviews Heritance Kandalama

There were some really nice things about this hotel, but customer service wasn't one of them. The check in process is very slow. As soon as you've arrived at the hotel, they seat you in an area near one of the pools and bring you a nice fruity drink. They take your passports and leave! About 10 minutes later they came back, asked a few questions about our booking, offered an upgrade (the hotel was not so busy as we were there in the off season) and explained that I had made an error in the number of people occupying one of our 2 rooms (I booked for only one but we were 2 people, my fault entirely). No problem, they said. I would just have to pay for breakfast for the second person since the room was reserved on a bed and breakfast basis, but there would not be any additional charge for the room since I had already paid for the double room anyway. Great, I thought. Off we went to the cashier. The charge for breakfast was $28 USD per day for the additional person. Pretty expensive to say the least. As it turned out, I was not feeling well the next morning and did not go down to the buffet. The second morning, I did go to breakfast. It was a pretty typical buffet with all the usual stations. Good quality, tasty food in abundance but nothing that was particularly exceptional. The only thing negative was that we had to ask for coffee three times before it arrived, but hey, that can happen anywhere and we had gone down at peak time, so it's understandable. The thing that really got me though, was that when we checked out I asked to be refunded the $28 for the breakfast that I had additionally paid for on check-in but didn't eat. I was told that the money could not be refunded because part of the fee was an additional room fee and not only for the meal. When I insisted that I had been told otherwise, the cashier sitting next to him nodded his head in agreement with what I was saying and spoke in Sinhalese to the employee that was telling me "No". I'm thinking maybe he had been there when I paid the breakfast fee but to be honest, I'm not sure. The guy I was talking to then called another employee (maybe a manager? He never introduced himself) to come into the office and the 2 of them spoke again in Sinhalese, so of course I have no idea what was said. Impolite at the very least, then this new guy re-iterated that part of the extra fee I had paid on check in was indeed partly for the meal and partly for the use of the room by a second person and it would therefore be impossible for them to give me any consideration. So either the guy who checked us in lied, or the two guys checking me out lied. The total for our two-night stay was well over $1000 USD. The amount of refund I was requesting for a service that I did not use would have been about 2.5% of our total bill, but instead of making me a happy customer they chose to be petty and mean (as in cheap). Not what I would call good customer service.