Nest Style Zanzibar

First and foremost the hotel staff was so friendly and kind. That made a huge difference to our stay.
We did have a wonderful stay at the hotel even though as you can read below there is a lot of things we would have done differently.
We also enjoyed the free Makunduchi tour the hotel arranges every Wednesday, it was very nice to learn more about the village and the people living there.

Since Zanzibar is an island with a lower standard on things than what we are used to in Europe there are some facts you just have to accept on your holiday. There will be so called brownouts, 1-2min of no electricity. This happened at least once a day but was never for more than 5min.
At times there will be no water in the tap, this also was never for more than 5min.
They don't have waste handling in Zanzibar so there is a lot of trash everywhere. The hotel is clean and they take care if trash on their own property.
Only three bikes to rent.
Since Makunduchi is not yet a very big town you have to book transport in advance and it is quite expensive (although fair since your driver will be waiting at you at the destination and drive you back).

Food:
For most of our stay we ate the local dishes that they had on the menu and that was mainly because it was so delicious! We would have liked for them to offer even more local dishes both on a la carte and buffet.
A lot of the beer they had on the menu was not available during our stay. This we felt was just about bad planning.
We were only offered the breakfast included deal when booking our stay. We would have liked for the hotel to offer us all inclusive when we arrived. We came quite early in the season so even though it might not have been possible the first days they should have mentioned it to us. Even with the breakfast included, we had to pay 5$ to get the breakfast on the go.
We felt the dinner buffet was too expensive, it cost 45000tsh but that did not include drinks which meant that the staff had to ask your room number every time you took a drink, this made us feel like we were watched. We get that it's a bigger cost for drinks but it would be easy to cut costs on for example only offering 2 dessert not 5. The buffet food was ok but we preferred the local dishes on the a la carte menu.
Service by the pool was not very active, they could sell a lot more drinks and snacks if they wanted to.

Cleaning:
They very thorough with their cleaning, it would even take one hour for them to clean our room.
They had some problems with towels not drying so we did not get new handtowels after day two until we asked for ones. We also didn't have pool towels one day because they had no dry ones. I think they should invest in something other than frotee towels...
Cleaning staff did not fill towels at the same time when cleaning but kept on giving new things (bathroom mat, big towels, water bottles) during the day, we really feel that everything should be done at one time to avoid going back to the guests room.
One day we got woken up by room cleaning staff at 09.00. This is too early when breakfast doesn't end by 10.00.

Beach shop:
Quite expensive and the offering is not so good. I would have appreciated more products using recycled materials and more African kangas, more like the shops at the airport and by The Rock restaurant.
Massage was good.

The bar hade loud music at bar even after 22.00 and started playing music at around 07.00. With doors and windows like that you can't play lound music when people would like to sleep. This was fixed with earplugs. Night bar should be by the reception to avoid disturbing sleeping guests.

We would have appreciated a folder with information in the room. That could include the tours the hotel offers, wifi info, how to get more tea/coffee to your room, laundry service, how to get new pool towels, how the safe works, menu options, when breakfast, lunch and dinner is served, what happens in case of fire, blackout and no running water...

Last but not least we felt really safe and all the things mentioned before are things that are easy to fix.
The interior and style of the hotel was very cozy and clean which we appreciated.