Story  and photos by Manos Angelakis

Mövenpic Mansour Eddahbi
Avenue Mohammed VI, Hivernage,
Marrakech 40020 Morocco
 https://www.movenpick.com
+212-5243-39100

The Mövenpick Mansour Eddahbi Marrakech, an ACCOR hotel, is a business hotel that seems to be geared mostly towards corporate meetings and business travel. It is an outstanding facility for that type of business, but I’m not sure an individual leisure traveler would really be very happy being among a throng of corporate meeting attendees. Having said that, we enjoyed our stay there.

Located in L’Hivernage area, on the beautiful Mohammed VI avenue in the city center, near the Medina and just 4 km away from the international airport, the Mövenpick Marrakech features over 500 rooms and suites, three restaurants and a bar, O de Rose spa and wellbeing centre, with well tended gardens and three splendid swimming pools. It's a 10-minute drive to the Djemaa el-Fna Square and the Mansour's Badi Palace.

The hotel was reimagined by the French architectural Studio MHNA in a $100-million refit into a palatial property with giant, gilded bird cages that house metallic falcons, marble corridors with idiosyncratic furniture, gilded moucharabieh screens and water channels that channel water everywhere you walk. It is not really all that intimate, but it is a feast for the eyes.

The hotel is smoke-free and soundproofed as much as possible for a large group of buildings and there is free WiFi in all public areas and rooms. There is free parking, either valet or self parking. As mentioned above, there are three restaurants, a bar and a coffee shop/café, 1 poolside bar and, of course room service. Additionally there is a spa, a hammam and a fitness room.

Saray, serves an international buffet breakfast with local Moroccan dishes in a setting rich with Berber and Arab Andaluz influences. Jamra Organic & Healthy Living serves a mix of organic dishes, a great variety of salad options and a very large assortment of fresh fruit. The Urban Brasserie presents an array of very good international and Mediterranean dishes and the Manso Terrace bar offers drinks and tapas around the pool. 

There is a night club, but we did not visit it.

One of the advantages I would like to mention is the multilingual staff. The languages mainly spoken in Morocco are Moroccan and French. If you don’t have facility with those two, it might be trying to communicate with locals as we found in other press trips in the past. Here they speak, in addition to Moroccan and French, English, Spanish, German, Italian and Arabic.

Having stayed in numerous 5* properties through the years, and having worked with a top hotel marketing and reservations company for 20, there are a few things that should be attended to by management, particularly dealing in the international travel arena. I believe it is a question of proper staff training, especially the front desk.

I also consider this property seriously understaffed.

In most of the 5-star hotels, the staff to guest ratio is usually 1 to 1; in the better Asian hotels it is 2 to 1 and the best properties, like the Royal Club Evian, the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok, the Peninsula Hong Kong and the Pierre in New York, ratio is 3 to 1.

Yes… the staff is as helpful as possible. But there should be more people available especially at the reception and the restaurants.

All things considered, I think it is one of the more luxurious and visually exciting North African hotels I’ve experienced.

 

 

 

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