Matlai holds 4.9 out of 5 on TripAdvisor across 371 reviews, and was ranked #1 of the 8 hotels in Pingwe when we last checked, in August 2026. It won the Travellers' Choice award every year from 2017 to 2023. In 2022 it also took Travellers' Choice Best of the Best, which goes to roughly the top 1% of listings worldwide. This page is the honest version of what those numbers mean and what they do not.
The awards, in full
- Travellers' Choice — 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Seven consecutive years.
- Travellers' Choice Best of the Best, 2022 — the smaller category, awarded to about the top 1% of properties on the platform.
- Certificate of Excellence Hall of Fame, 2018 and 2019 — given after five consecutive years of the certificate.
We have had no award notification since May 2023, so 2023 is the most recent one and we are not going to imply otherwise. TripAdvisor changes its criteria and its categories from time to time, and a hotel with six rooms sits close to the volume thresholds these things use.
What a 4.9 from 371 reviews actually tells you
Less than a hotel would like you to think, and more than nothing. A high average on a small property is easier to achieve than on a large one — six rooms means twelve guests, and twelve guests can be looked after in a way that four hundred cannot. That is a structural advantage, not a virtue.
What the volume does tell you is that the score is not a handful of reviews from friends. 371 is a lot for a property this size, accumulated over more than a decade, and it includes the difficult ones.
Every review with text written in it has been replied to — a 100% response rate. That is the number we would look at if we were reading someone else's page, because it is the one that cannot be gamed by being small.
About stars
Zanzibar has no official star classification. Every star rating you see attached to a hotel on this island was assigned by the hotel itself, including ours.
We say four. A European five-star hotel is expected to have things we do not have — several restaurants, 24-hour room service, a fitness centre — and we would rather be an honest four than a five nobody audits. Guests routinely tell us that by the standards of hotels here it feels like more than that, which is a nicer thing to be told than to claim.
For the same reason, you will not find a star rating in this site's structured data. Publishing a self-assigned rating in a format designed for verified ones is a small dishonesty, and the search engines are not the ones who would be misled by it.
Read them yourself
The reviews are more useful than any summary of them, including this one — particularly the three- and four-star ones, which are where you learn what a place is actually like. The recurring criticisms are worth knowing before you book: the drive from the airport is longer than people expect at around an hour and a quarter, the tide goes out a long way on this coast, and seaweed lands on the spring tides.
All three are true, none of them are fixable, and we would rather you read them here first. More of that sort of thing is in our FAQs before visiting Zanzibar.