http://www.trivago.com/banghazi-85511/hotel/tibesti-1100596 http://www.trivago.com/banghazi-85511/hotel/tibesti-1100596 http://ie2.trivago.com/images/layoutimages/logos/default.png http://www.trivago.com/banghazi-85511/hotel/tibesti-1100596/review-o544345 Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:59:00 +0200
~Vital Statistics~

The Tibesti has 220 rooms, 22 suites and 9 Presidential suites. It stands 15 stories high which makes it the tallest building in the city which says more about the rest of the city than it does about the Tibesti. It has conference halls, meeting rooms and a business centre, a health club with sauna, gym and swimming pool which are open to women on Mondays and Wednesdays and to men the rest of the week. There are four restaurants and two coffee shops. My guess is that no more than one third of all these facilities were actually open during our visit.

~Look at Me!~

The Tibesti is supposed to be a fancy hotel and is either the best or second best in Benghazi depending on who you believe. You can tell that it really thinks that it's something very special. For one thing it's absolutely enormous, for another the rooms overlook what appears to be a parade ground on the side of the lake. You get the impression it might be the kind of place that would be built for world/African/Middle Eastern leaders to come and indulge in some fancy conference at great cost to their governments. It's a 'statement' hotel one that says 'Look over her, I'm posh, me!' only it does it in completely the wrong accent and to the wrong people.

~Our Visits~

In some ways, the Tibesti Hotel was doomed to disappoint before we even set foot in the place. We'd just spent eight hours at Tripoli airport waiting for a flight to Benghazi which had been repeatedly cancelled and delayed. When we finally got to Benghazi it was on the wrong airline and so late that we'd lost all sense of humour or perspective. As the bus pulled up outside the massive white edifice of the Tibesti, I think everyone was just so relieved that we'd finally arrived that we couldn’t have cared what the place was like.

It was about 1 am by the time we arrived. The bus parked up outside and we left our bags in the eager hands of the porters and headed into the lobby to collapse on the sofas whilst the tour guide collected our passports for the hotel to do their administration. Looking around us the lobby was a mish-mash of different styles. On the plus side it had some gorgeous carpets and acres of pink granite flooring. On the minus side, the dozens of ginger leather sofas weren't doing it any favours. The reception area was decorated with hundreds of strange glass tubes suspended from the ceiling and strange three dimensional textured decorations in a garish shade of orange. A portrait of a young Colonel Gaddafi stared shiftily from the wall on the way to the lifts. A row of shops and travel agencies filled one side of the lobby and dozens of almost identical potted plants stood around as if bugged to spy on conversation. To the far end of the lobby there was a bar/coffee shop area with lots of café tables and at the very end was the entrance to one of the many restaurants.

~The Rooms~

Each time we stayed we had rooms the upper floors from memory the 12th and 14th. In each case we had rooms on the side that overlooked the lake though on the second case this wasn't such a good thing because it also overlooked the car park where two car alarms went off from most of the night. The rooms were of a size and level of equipment that I'd expect in a European four-star hotel but the thing that let them down was the décor. It wasn't offensive, just very old-fashioned.

Both rooms were identical with oatmeal coloured carpets, cream chenille bedspreads on the two single beds, onyx table and standard lamps (when did you last see onyx?), a coffee table and two chairs in front of the window, a storage unit with drawers, desk and a television on top. The wardrobes were large and directly outside the bathroom. One strange anomaly was the presence throughout the hotel of British style three-pin electrical sockets.

The bathrooms were awful to look at with mottled green wall tiles, brown floor tiles and cheap-looking marble sinks. They came with both toilet and bidet and the baths had showers over them. In each case the bath had a gloomy blue shower curtain and a glass screen but the screens were illogically placed at the far end of the bath away from the shower head. Hot water was abundant on both occasions.

Lighting in the bathroom was awful and it wasn't much better anywhere else in the room or throughout the hotel. I had the perpetual sense that I was walking around with my sunglasses on indoors.

~Food Glorious Food~

Breakfast was served in a large blue room on the second floor. The walls were decorated in blue fabric, the carpet was blue, the chairs were blue, and of course the table cloths were orange. No that's a lie they were blue too. The selection of food was the best we saw in any of the Libyan hotels with a large choice of items, hot and cold, and a man on standby to fry up your made-to-measure omelettes on demand. Hot drinks were do it yourself and the bakery selection was quite impressive. On our second visit when we had to leave for the airport at 5.15 am, we were impressed to find the Tibesti had still been able to lay on a good breakfast for us despite the early hour.

On our second visit we'd had a long day visiting old ruins and had sat in the bus for many hours. Nobody could really face heading out to look for food so we agreed to meet in the hotel restaurant. One of the group headed off to find out what was on offer and returned to tell us that the buffet was 44 dinars per head (approximately £23) but he'd raised his eyebrows at the restaurant manager and got it down to 24 each. A further discussion between the tour guide and the manager and we were down to 22. By local terms this was a lot but considering we were in the most expensive hotel in town, we couldn't argue at their willingness to make it worth our while to stay. Since we were almost the only people in the restaurant that evening, we had to wonder what they would have done with all the food if we'd said no.

The soup and the cold buffet were both extensive and of good quality whilst the hot food was limited in scope for the vegetarians and coeliacs in the group. However nobody went hungry. The puddings were almost the only ones we'd seen all week and took quite a bashing from my husband.

~Recommend?~
If you have to be in Benghazi, it seems that it doesn't get much better than this. We were comfortable if a bit bemused by the place, the food and service were fine, the beds were good, the showers were hot and we slept well which is really the most important thing about any hotel. It scores no more than 2 out of 10 in the beauty stakes but considering that sanctions were imposed only a few years after it opened and hardly anyone visited for a dozen years, you can hardly expect the hotel to try too hard during the time it was cut off from the outside world. For me it was more than adequate and only the car alarms and the dim lighting caused more than mild annoyance.
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