My husband and I have stayed in a LOT of motels/hotels over the years, both in NZ and overseas. We're not novices when it comes to knowing what to expect with accommodation, but even we were surprised by the unfortunate experience we had at Orewa Beachcomber. It'd seemed perfect online and we'd read countless, glowing reviews before we booked! We chose this place as it looked comfortable, classy and relaxing. Now that we've stayed there for 5 nights, we know it's anything but! In fact, it was more like a comedy of errors! The rooms DO look nice and have been very tastefully decorated, no doubt about it. But once you stay a few nights, you find out the pitfalls involved with staying at this motel... To give you a bit of background to our unfortunate stay: I booked a family apartment via Booking.com. After my booking was confirmed, I emailed the property directly to ask whether we could have an upstairs apt. They emailed me back to say 'yes, we have booked you into an upstairs apartment'. I was pleased to receive their confirmation as I'd read via reviews that the lower units were possibly more susceptible to roadside noise and the upper units might be a bit more private. When we arrived at the motel, we went to the reception area, where there was nobody to be found (this was actually a common occurrence at this motel - the owners seemed often quite 'elusive'). So we rang the number provided on the many signs left around the reception area & the lady owner answered (she was apparently 'out shopping'). She welcomed us pleasantly and efficiently enough though over the phone & told us to go and check ourselves in - to a unit on the ground floor! Remember, this was AFTER we'd received emailed confirmation to say we could have an upstairs unit! But we'd just driven for 8 hours from Gisborne & were exceptionally tired, so we just went with the flow and didn't mention the emailed confirmation at that point in time (we were later told that they 'didn't have any family units upstairs' anyway. But, my question remains: WHY did they email me to say we could have one?). The first room we checked into was attached to the little cafe that operates in this same motel building... I was immediately concerned we'd be affected by noise from the cafe. I was right. But before we had that pleasure, we had the pleasure of enduring almost a full day of constant reno noise! Yes, they're renovating the motel - and not in a discrete way! On our first day (Fri), the whole motel shook until nearly 6pm with loud hammering, banging, sawing & drilling. Relaxing - not! On our second day (Sat), we were woken up at 8.30am by thumping bass music from the cafe. It was then that we finally decided to complain about noise (once we could actually FIND one of the owners!). To their credit, they rectified the issue of us being right next to the cafe & promptly let us move to another unit at the back of the motel. Sadly, this unit had problems of its own, incl. a very temperamental aircon unit! The male owner came & 'reset' it for us and told us not to push buttons on the remote too quickly as it might've confused the aircon unit. We dutifully followed his advice, but we continued to have issues with it for the rest of our stay. Interestingly, we hadn't had any issues operating the previous room's aircon unit (which was the same type of unit). So we felt something was definitely wrong with the second room's aircon unit, which was not due to us pressing buttons too quickly on the remote. But we didn't complain again about the air con as we were reluctant to move to a THIRD room! We'd already had an unbelievable amount of disruptions anyway to what was supposed to be a relaxing family holiday away... Another problem we encountered during the majority of our stay was a lack of room service. Room service seemed to often take place later in the day from what we observed, even though the trolley with towels on it was wheeled out in full view of the units at 9.30am on the dot every day. Again, all show, no go! Most of the time with our room, even though we were out for a good few hours most days and used the motel's own 'please service my room' sign, the room was still not done when we got back - even by 1pm-ish in the arvos and even if the motel was fairly empty! We ended up changing our own towels when we got back in the arvos! Other problems we encountered were: ants on the kitchen bench (in the first unit), a dangerous shower setup in both units (water overflows onto the floor easily), dodgy unsecured wifi that seemed to work sometimes and not at other times (I had an up-to-date iPhone and iPad on me too, so it wasn't my equipment at fault but their wifi service), & an extremely uncomfortable bed (in the second unit we stayed in), which led to bad sleep. Don't be fooled by the glamorous-looking rooms. Sometimes all that glitters ain't gold. read more