Galaxy Hotel, Yangon Review

Galaxy Hotel

No. (2A/5A), Okklar Thiri Garden Street, D Expend, North Okklar Township, Yangon 11101, Myanmar 

Check in Saturday, March 4,, 2017 (late check in 6AM)

Check out Sunday, March 5, 2017 (very early check out at 5AM)

Our stay 1 night, 1 room

Room  4th Floor, with Lift; 2 adults

Non Smoking, 1Double Bed

We arrived at the hotel a little past 6AM from Bagan. We booked two nights so we could check in immediately as soon as we're back in Yangon since we came from another nine grueling hours of bus ride from Bagan via JJ Express. Nine hours on a bus will not get you enough rest really because you're sitting the whole time except for couple of stopovers. 

Our room for the night

Galaxy Hotel have four floors and you could see the name of the hotel from afar as it's towering. The cabbie charged us 10,000 kyat as it's quite far from the bus terminal than the airport. The hotel is also spanking new just by the the look of the lobby, very western, very familiar. For me, it will be a toss between a 3-4 star hotel compared to the other budget hotels in Yangon. 

The lady at the front desk welcomed us warmly and provided us cold refreshments at 6AM though lol but I absolutely appreciate the effort. We waited at the cozy and dimly lit lobby while she scans our passports and as soon as she's done, she handed us our key card and wifi password. The bellboy then ushered us to our floor, lo and behold the hotel has lift so going up and down won't be a problem at all thank God. We were assigned a room on the 4th floor with huge windows and drapes.

Amenities

Our room is fully equipped with pretty much everything; dental kits, comb, shower cap and even a razor with shaving cream, slippers, mini fridge, in-room safe, they even have q-tips, toothpicks for some reason, big flat screen TV as usual with few English channels and again shower gel and shampoo dispensers. The toilet and bath is also equipped with a bath tub, heater as usual and my favorite hand-held bidet. The rubbish bin in the toilet was very small though although they have a  bigger one in the bedroom. 

Wifi

My sister and I had a little trouble with wifi access initially that we needed to go back down to the lobby to check how come our phones were unable to connect to the hotel's wifi access. The lady at the front desk was very helpful though, she even called up their IT department I think and, restarted their router and after few minutes it's all good. The signal strength though was quite intermittent upstairs and again I guess they may need to put routers on each floor to boost the wifi signal. We were already supposed to head back upstairs but the receptionist called us to let us know that breakfast is ready at the dining hall. Very good customer service I should say. 

continental breakfast

Breakfast

Galaxy Hotel offered the best breakfast selections among all the hotels we stayed at in Myanmar. They offered a wide array of items to choose from and theirs is more of a continental breakfast to me than Asian. The food were hot and fresh so we were really enticed to pretty much pick everything. We had fried rice, stir fried noodles, steamed veggies (finally), those lovely triangular dumpling, Papaya slices & brewed coffee. We were so stuffed afterwards and our tummies were very happy with such gastronomic experience. Make sure to grab breakfast at 7:30AM. I love having breakfast when the dining hall is still not so crowded. Their breakfast hours is also until 10AM.

After breakfast, we had some nice and warm shower, rest for hours and decided to head back downstairs in the afternoon to check out what’s outside (possible places to eat, convenience store perhaps or what not). The hotel btw is next to a Monastery thus explains why it’s not noisy nor busy outside. Looking out the window there’s a view of this round lake from afar which serves as their mini park I think where joggers, yogis (the ones who do Yoga) go to in the morning. Less than a 100 meters away from the hotel you’ll find an average sized convenience store (much bigger than 711) that sells pretty much everything except cold cuts lol. They have ice cream, this deep fried something in curry which reminded me of Ministop’s Karimadon, Pringles for 3,000 kyat etcetera. Out of curiosity we bought couple of those Karimadon looking curry something for 1,500 kyat a piece as far as I can remember, Pringles, this sweet bread, and a bottle of distilled water which we paid 6,000 plus kyats in total (about P200.00+) then we headed back to our hotel. The main road is also just right outside where the convenience store is located. You just walk left from the hotel, then turn left again once you see the arch and the convenience store (with sensor sliding door) is right there. Imagine, they have sensor doors at a convenient store in Myanmar? My beloved country where have we been. 

Lift ; Breakfast Bar/dining hall

Movie time as soon as we came back to our hotel room, I had a portable USB drive with me which I loaded with few movies from my Macbook, then plugged to their TV with USB port and we have automatic English movie without Burmese subtitles lol (we watched "Lalaland"). We kind of noticed that they always have Burmese subtitles on all their English movie channels probably because English isn’t really something they would explicitly include in their school curriculum.

Anyways, we decided to spend our day inside our hotel room because we’re still tired from our Bagan trip the day before. We climbed Mt. Popa’s 777 steps wtf so our leg muscles still hurts and if only we could bring those heavy free foot massage equipment at the Changi Airport we would. Slept soundly that night and woke up at 3AM to prep up. We left the hotel at 5:45AM. The hotel staff called a cab for us to take us to the Yangon Int’l Airport. They do not offer free airport service btw just to clarify. Their 24 hour airport service is at your own expense, the hotel will call up a cab company to pick you up then take you to the airport for roughly 4,000 kyat. Our cab driver though only charged us 3,500 kyat which I gave him 500 kyat as tip because we just need to dispose our kyats before we head home.

To sum it up, I had a great time at the Galaxy Hotel plus it’s really close to the airport. The breakfast was superb and the hotel was really clean and well maintained as it’s also still brand new. The hotel is situated in a quiet area, accessible from public transport other than cabs. Taking a cab is also the most convenient way to get around Yangon. In my opinion though, Galaxy Hotel is the best airport hotel in Yangon and if ever I would go back there I would still prefer to stay there and having said that therefore I am giving them a 9 out of 10. I would of course recommend Galaxy Hotel to finicky travelers especially if you’re not the backpacker type. We also did not experience any power outage at all during our stay so cheers to that.