We just returned yesterday from a 5 night stay in Jambo house. It was myself, DH and DS (22 months) in one room and my MIL in another room.
We requested connecting/close rooms, early check in and late check out, savannah with zebras.
We received all except connecting rooms and I was somewhat upset by that as it was our first request. Upon checkin, we were told that my MIL room was directly across the hall, and that we could not get connecting rooms until 2 days later. When we got to our rooms, my MIL's room was 7 rooms down the hall - not across. She had the first room on the 2nd floor of the Kudu trail, next to the Ashrua rock. She had a partial savannah view and was happy, so we didn't request any changes from the front desk. The staff didn't act like they had been trained properly to answer questions. The person who checked us in had to keep going back to his boss to answer our basic questions.
Our room was nice and we were able to see many of the animals throughout our stay. The rooms are small and there is not a lot of drawer space for clothing and other items. My only complaint about the resort was mousekeeping. We could not get them to give us toiletries and was not able to fully wash in the shower for 2 days of the trip. I had to call down for someone to replace everything. Once we had used what they gave us, we didn't get any new soap or conditioner (we left nice tips every day).
Mara was very nice and had everything that we needed on the go for our little boy. We also ate at Saana and Jiko and loved both.
The bus transportation was fast and the ride to the parks was not nearly as long as I thought based upon the comments that I have read here. Most waits were less than 10 minutes and we only had 2 20 minute waits the entire week.
We walked onto most rides and our longest wait was 20 minutes for TSM at 9:30am at DHS. We did the morning EMH (not recommended by TGM and TP, but we got so much done and it was wonderful!!
All in all, I would recommend the AKL to someone else, but for being a "Deluxe Resort" I expected more. Hopefully they can train staff better and get mousekeeping on board.
Maybe we will see you there.
