Livingston Hotel - Sandakan, Sabah

- August 03, 2020

We stayed at Four Point by Sheraton Sandakan on our last visit to Sandakan but unfortunately the hotel has permanently closed. So we Googled and one of the best hotel to stay in Sandakan right now is Livingston Hotel. It's just 10 minutes drive (6.7km) to Sandakan Town. We decided to stay here for three nights. However, there's no Covid-19 temperature screening upon entry to their hotel. We only saw a DIY touch-free hand sanitizer at the entrance of the hotel.

We stayed in a deluxe room that comes with a king size bed, wall mounted LCD TV (limited TV channel), working desk, in-room safe box, hair dryer (stopped working after 10 minutes), coffee or tea making facilities, 2 complimentary bottles of drinking water, self controlled air conditioning, bathroom with cold or hot shower and toiletries (they only provide one small bottle of 2 in 1 body and hair shampoo). The room is clean and comfortable. However, they only provide two pillows. Therefore, we decided to request additional pillows and they charged us RM 5 / pillow.

Shower and toilet is separated by a glass door. The bathroom tiles can be slippery when wet. So you would need to be careful. Apart from that, their bathroom sink isn't draining very well. Water pressure in the shower is good and water is hot enough. There's a balcony overlooking the street. Sometimes, the street is quite noisy with bikes and car passing frequently. Apart from that, we can hear our next door guest talking early in the morning too.

Hotel room phone is not working when we checked in. We found out the cable has been pulled out from the phone. Not to mention their in-room safe is not working as well. Basically, we have to use our mobile phone to call the front desk and requested them to come and fix it. Luckily they attended our request promptly. On the next day, we requested housekeeping before we went out for lunch since we ran out of toilet paper and body shampoo. (we even on the digital signage for housekeeping outside our room). However, when we came back two hours later it was not done yet.

There's an outdoor swimming pool but you need to use the back door to get to the swimming pool. We saw a hotel staff and asked whether they have any gym room and she told us that the gym is not ready yet. Overall stay was just okay. It could have been much better if the front desk staff were friendlier.

Room rate - RM 150 per night exclusive breakfast