Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort – Honest Hotel Review

After safari, many people opt for a few days at a beach resort in Zanzibar to recover — and after going on safari, I now know why! After nearly two weeks on an East African safari on rough roads through various game parks in Kenya and Tanzania, we wrapped up with a stay at the Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort in Zanzibar, Tanzania. I am not a beach person and this was my first time at an all-inclusive resort in my life. And I liked it! Let’s take a closer look at the Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort

Table of Contents

• Getting to Zanzibar
• Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort – Location
• Check In at the Royal Zanzibar Resort
• What is included at the Royal Zanzibar Resort?
• Rooms at the Royal Zanzibar Resort
• Food at the Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort
• Pools and Beach at the Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort
• Overall Vibe at the Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort
• Final Thoughts – Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort – Tanzania
• More East Africa Safari Information

Getting to Zanzibar

You can fly or take a ferry — but chances are, if you’re doing this through a safari tour operator, you’ll be flying. I’m glad I had our tour operator arrange this for us vs. having to handle this on my own. It just made everything easier. Our driver took us to the Arusha Domestic Airport where we boarded a plane to Zanzibar. The domestic airport in Arusha is much much smaller and (so I’ve heard) less hassle than flying out of the main Kilimanjaro International Airport. We did not encounter any scams or harassment. It was a pleasant experience. The flight is very quick and you’ll be in Zanzibar before you know it. As for transportation to our resort, our safari tour company took care of all of this for us and it was seamless.

RELATED: Crash Course for Planning Your First East Africa Safari

Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort – Location

Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort is located on the northern end of the island of Zanzibar. This is far away from almost any of Zanzibar’s tourist attractions, which concerned me, as I had a whole list of stuff I wanted to do there. It’s over an hour away from Zanzibar’s famous Stone Town.

So this location isn’t ideal for sightseeing as there isn’t much around but being that we only had two days — and this place was picked for us by our safari tour operator — I didn’t have much choice.

On our way to the resort, the roads leading up to the hotel made me question this place and got me a bit worried, as it looked like war zone. The nice paved road turned into a sandy dirt track, much like the roads we had experienced in the game parks on safari. The area around the hotel doesn’t look that safe, so we didn’t feel the need to go wandering around outside of the gates of the hotel.

If I had went to Zanzibar on my own, with no safari tour company doing the booking, I would’ve stayed elsewhere and did other things. Originally, that’s what I wanted to do, as I had a few resorts specifically in mind and a Google map full of pins of stuff I wanted to see. However, doing this through my tour operator proved to be so much easier so I went with this option. In hindsight, I am glad we did it with our tour operator as I had no idea going on safari would be so draining that me, the GOGOGO-type, would need beach days.

We did arrange a driver to take us to Stone Town for the day during one of our days here and I’m glad we did that. We ended up just taking a boat to Prison Island, doing some exploring there, and then headed back to our resort. We were still too beat up from safari to even bother walking around Stone Town.

RELATED: How did I plan all of this? Here is my exact Ultimate 3-Week East Africa Safari Itinerary

Check In at the Royal Zanzibar Resort

Check in was pretty fast and easy — when checking in, you’ll be given the lay of the land about the resort, and given wristbands. You have to wear the wristband for your entire stay — if you cut it off or lose it, you’ll have to pay $50 USD to replace this silly wristband. I don’t know where they came up with $50 for a standard coated paper wristband you’d get at any nightclub, but that’s the deal.

Ask me how I know. My sister cut hers off because she didn’t want to wear it to bed (understandable) and then the next morning, went down and they wanted to charge $50 to the room to replace it. She put it back together using dental floss. See? We are total newbs at AI resorts!

Your bags will be brought to your room by the staff.

What is included at the Royal Zanzibar Resort?

Everything — unless you want top shelf alcohol, which we are not interested in. All your meals, meals at the restaurant, drinks at the swim up bar, use of the open air gym, WiFi, etc. There is nightly live music or dancing entertainment.

There is an on-site spa here, with services for an extra fee.

When you check out, you have to pay a small tax fee — it was like $1 USD. No big deal.

Rooms at the Royal Zanzibar Resort

Our room was gigantic! I loved everything about the room, except the fact that we had one King bed — would’ve preferred to have two beds, as my sister and I hate sharing a bed, but it worked out fine. Everything was clean, modern, and overall very nice! We had a lovely balcony, a gigantic bathroom (with a bathtub, separate shower area and two sinks), and overall, just plenty of space.

On our last day here, we asked for a late checkout for 1pm and they were happy to give us that.

RELATED: Another nice place we stayed at on safari – Ngorongoro Crater Coffee Lodge

Food at the Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort

The only thing we didn’t like was the food. If you’ve read my other safari articles and safari lodge reviews, this is a common occurrence and I swear we are not extremely picky eaters. It’s just that the food has no flavor and just isn’t good. It’s poor quality.

However, if you eat in the a la carte “Cliff Restaurant” by the beach (which is included and has great views), the food was much, much better than the slop served in the main buffet dining area.

Pools and Beach at the Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort

Royal Zanzibar Beach resort is located on Nungwi Beach and it’s very nice — clean and decent for swimming, although most people were swimming in the pools and not in the ocean. We were worried about getting harassed by “beach boys” in Zanzibar — essentially, young men who follow you and try to get you to buy stuff, but we didn’t even see any of these “beach boys” here. We saw some vendors on the beach, but we were never harassed by anyone, which was nice. I do want to stress that this is not a private beach, so your experience may vary and other guests have had issues with ‘beach boys’ here; we just lucked out.

There is a whole network of pools here, from an infinity pool to a wading pool to a swim up bar. It was never, ever crowded here, you could always get a beach chair, we had no issues getting drinks at the bar, etc. Part of this probably was because we visited in March (low season) — I have no idea how crowds would be during other times of the year. Overall, though everything was immaculately clean and there were good views here for days.

Overall Vibe at the Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort

Again, I’ll preface this with we visited in low season. This place is quiet. There were no crazy drunks, no screaming kids (but it is family-friendly), no kind of obnoxious behavior. This is considered a 5-star resort, but it’s definitely more of a mid-range type place. This isn’t an ultra high end resort, but it is very nice.

One thing we noticed is that this caters heavily toward Europeans, as in one of the activity huts by the main lobby had everything written in French or German, as to what was going on during the day or day tips/excursions you could arrange. There’s also a small library here and all of the books were in French or German as well. Other than that, the staff all speaks English, so you shouldn’t have any issues, I just wanted to point that out.

Final Thoughts – Royal Zanzibar Beach Resort – Tanzania

Overall, I really enjoyed staying here. They call this a 5-star resort, but don’t come into this expecting a 5 star resort you’d get in the Maldives; this is Tanzanian 5-star. Which, overall, this was fine. We had a great time here and I wish we could’ve stayed longer. The only negative was the food — it wasn’t that great, but the saving grace was the food at the Cliff Restaurant. Would I stay here again? Probably not, only because there are other places I’d like to try.