A butler is the one constant of a stay at Matlai — the person who learns how you take your coffee on day one and keeps getting it right on day five. Here's what the role actually involves, and how we train the people who do it.
What a Matlai Butler Does
Your butler is the single point of contact for anything you need during your stay: setting up a private meal anywhere across the property, connecting you with the spa, walking you through the tide charts, and helping arrange excursions — snorkelling trips, a sunset sail, an island tour — through the local operators we work with. Airport transfers work the same way: your butler helps you arrange the ride with one of our trusted local driving partners, since hotels in Zanzibar are not permitted to run their own taxi service.
Where Our Butlers Come From
Our butler team is drawn from across Tanzania — some grew up nearby on Zanzibar, others come from the mainland — and most arrive with a background in hotel management studies or earlier hospitality work elsewhere on the island or beyond it. What they have in common is attentiveness: reading what a guest needs before being asked, and holding onto small preferences (a favourite table, a drink order, a nickname for a returning guest) across an entire stay.
Training the Next Generation
As part of our commitment to the local community, we invite people from hospitality schools to join us as butler trainees for three months. The programme gives them real, hands-on training, and successful trainees are offered a work contract at the end of it — nurturing local talent rather than only hiring already-trained staff from elsewhere.
Some of our butlers bring skills that show up in unexpected places — a background in an acrobatic performance troupe has occasionally added an extra flourish to a New Year's Eve celebration at the hotel, for instance.
A staff acrobatic performance, New Year's Eve
The Team Behind Your Stay
Whether it's arranging an aloe treatment after a day in the sun or connecting you with the right person for an island tour, our butlers are the reason a stay at Matlai feels personal rather than transactional. It's a small team, which is exactly why it works — with six rooms and a full villa on the property, no one's spread thin.
