Serviced apartment or hotel in Nairobi?

We let a serviced apartment, so treat this as interested advice. It is still worth writing honestly, because the wrong choice is expensive and the deciding factor is simpler than most comparisons make it: how long you are staying.

Hotels are better for short stays

For two or three nights, a hotel is hard to beat. Someone is at a desk at two in the morning. Breakfast happens without you thinking about it. If the room disappoints, you are gone before it matters. Nothing about an apartment improves a forty-eight-hour trip.

There is also a real convenience in a hotel invoice — one line, one supplier, easy to file. If someone else is paying and nobody is counting, the hotel is the path of least resistance.

Apartments win from about the fourth night

Longer stays change what you need. The things that were irrelevant on night two become the shape of your day by night six.

• A kitchen. Not for cooking every meal — for coffee at six, for not eating out on a Tuesday, for keeping food you actually like in a fridge.
• Laundry. Two weeks of hotel laundry costs more than most people expect, and travelling with two weeks of clothes is worse.
• A desk that is a desk. Hotel rooms are designed around the bed. If you are working, the difference is felt daily.
• Separation. Somewhere to sit that is not the bed matters more the longer you are there.

What apartments genuinely give up

An honest list, because the marketing versions of this article never include one.

• No front desk at 3am. Most operators, us included, are a phone call rather than a lobby. That is fine right up until it is not.
• No restaurant downstairs. On a night when you have nothing left, room service is a real thing to miss.
• More variance. Hotel chains are consistent. Apartments are individual, which cuts both ways — read what the listing actually says, and be suspicious of photographs without a floor area.

The Nairobi-specific part

Two things matter here that would not elsewhere. The first is location within the city: traffic means a cheaper place twenty minutes away can cost you an hour a day. The second is the building itself — backup power, water storage, security and working lifts are the difference between a good stay and a story you tell afterwards.

Ask about those four before you ask about the décor. A beautiful apartment in a building without a generator is a beautiful apartment with no Wi-Fi for an afternoon.

On price

Compare the whole cost, not the nightly rate. A hotel at a similar headline price adds breakfast, laundry and most of your dinners; an apartment absorbs them. Booking directly rather than through an intermediary removes the commission that sits inside the rate — which is the entire reason we sell direct and take payment on arrival.