The following is my review during our stay at the Mandarin in Jakarta in Oct 2006.

We booked our room through AMEX for a standard room and when we contacted the hotel via email to confirm our reservation, we were told that our room has been upgraded to a Club Level Room with the 'Welcome Statue' view. The hotel is situated smack dab in the middle of Jakarta's Central Business District, right across from the Hyatt and Plaza Indonesia. Most high-end shopping centers are within less than 20-miles away, although given the horrendous Jakarta traffic it might take you an hour to reach a 10-mile destination. But that's another story altogether :-)

Because of recent bombings in Jakarta almost every building there has a security checkpoint and all visitors/guests must go through a metal detector gate as well as a bag hand-search before entering a building. Each car (except taxis) must also subject to trunk inspection before entering the lobby drive-through area, so be forewarned!

After we're done with the security, we were greeted warmly by the staff at the check-in desk and it was relatively uncrowded.The lobby has traditional Indonesian arts & craft design elements to it with marble surface. My husband wanted to upgrade our room to a suite and got it for an extra fee for a suite on 25th floor. In the elevator, I started noticing how old everything looked upon closer inspection. When we were shown our room, my heart almost sank when I saw the old & visibly well-worn carpeting, The suite has a good view of the city with Javanese hand-crafted furniture made of (I think) teak wood which was stained coffee dark. It has a separate living room with TV, sofas, kitchennette, bedroom, and bathroom with separate shower/bathtub. Don't get me wrong, everything was clean but it's quite old and well-worn which gave me quite a shock since we just checked-out of The Oriental Singapore (a hotel under the same chain but has much much better quality and look) before we arrived in Jakarta. The staff told me that they're doing some renovation on the lower floors and in the afternoon, the paint smell was so strong we couldn't stand it anymore and asked to be moved to another suite far away from the smell. We were given another suite on the 26th floor. This time it has an extra restroom in exchange for the kitchennette. The furniture and carpeting were better although they still looked old.

The next day, we went down to the cafe for breakfast and it was buffet with selections of asian and western cuisines. There were Indonesian chicken porridge, Indonesian fried rice, some bakery selections, juices, made-to-order eggs, etc. The food was okay although the restaurant has a nice garden surround view. It didn't provide significant separate area for non smokers so we were forced to endure stinking smoke smell from smokers all around us (trust me, those Indonesian cigarettes were stronger smelling and awful!!). Even our suite smelled like stale cigarette because they didn't have a non-smoking suite! Overall, I didn't find any fault with the service but I was very disappointed with the old and worn hotel and no separate non smoking area. I was only there for 2 days but would definitely have moved to another better hotel for the same rate (later I was told that other better choices were the Grand Hyatt across the street, or Shangri-La). I will not stay there again.