Poor service, terrible food, average room
We arrived dripping at the hotel as it was getting dark, and raining hard. I inquired about safe parking for our rented motorcycles. The front desk clerk described a lot located around the block marked by a small sign with the hotel's name. We found it -- it was large enough for about four cars, but it appeared after a few minutes to be both locked and unattended. We parked elsewhere and re-entered the hotel, where we asked the front desk clerk again about the parking lot, and he smiled and said "oh, but you didn't ask for the *key* to the lot!" No apologies, just a little smugness. We left our motorcycles parked on the street and tried to go up to our room. The elevator didn't work. We took the stairs. The room was tiny but clean, and you could hear everything in all of the rooms around. The hot water didn't work. There were a couple of amenities that weren't at other hotels, such as an iron, and shampoo. We went to the hotel's restaurant on the third floor and had the worst meal of our 10-day trip in Costa Rica. We had to send back a very crunchy baked potato for more time in the oven. Everything else -- really, everything else -- was terrible to varying degree. The same staff were serving late breakfast the next day as were serving dinner the night before (the breakfast, too, was the worst we had anywhere in Costa Rica). The view from the restaurant was, however, very nice. On checkout, when we forgot and left the air conditioning and TV remote controls in the room, we had to go back and get them in order to check out.
Our overall impression of the hotel was "wow, why would anyone who had done their research ever stay here?" There turned out to be many nicer-looking hotels just a kilometer or so up the road on the way to Manual Antonio.