Riad Daria Suites &Spa

We booked a suite for 4 nights in this Riad for the Marrakech leg of our honeymoon. In short, while the staff were kind and helpful, the quality of the accommodations and the business practices of its owner have been entirely unacceptable. In more details: The good: the staff was kind and helpful and tried to make the best off of their boss's shortcomings. The bad: The bed in our suite had a completely worn-out mattress - see picture - that would not provide any support. We didn't sleep very much our first night, thanks to the staff we were able to move to a different suite with a decent mattress. Compared to other riads we visited (a lot of the good restaurants in Marrakech are located inside riads), this riad itself is quite dark, cold and dingy, cleanliness is iffy (in particular the carpets), and there is a lot of safety and infrastructure problems - water not draining in showers, inefficient water heater, missing and/or not properly maintained fire extinguishers etc.... When we raised these concerns, the staff acknowledged that these are known, persistent problems. Definitely not a 4 stars hotel, more like at the low-end of 2 stars. The ugly: We first booked our stay with the hotel's website. We then received an email from the owner telling us that our credit card did not process the payment, and asking us instead to wire the money to his Swiss bank account. That sounded strange to us, so after checking that the payment was indeed blocked, we booked through Orbitz and informed the owner. Owner was not happy because his commission with Orbitz was much less, and somehow the next day the payment for the initial booking on the hotel's website was unblocked. Since then, the owner refuses to refund one of the bookings and wants to keep both payments. Through our text communications, he has been, in turns, making up excuses, playing the victim, gaslighting us - like he passive-aggressively does for anybody who leaves a review not to his taste, telling all sorts of stories, making fabricated claims, derailing the discussion, etc... the usual swindler playbook. The bottom line is that we paid twice for the same suite reservation, and whether it is his fault (and it is) or not is not relevant anyway, he has to refund the duplicate payment, like any business would do. Clearly that's not his first rodeo and he knows how to game his payment processing system. We are now five months past the initial chargeback, and our bank is only just beginning to internally escalate the matter rather than continuing to rely solely on the responses provided by the other party. Also at some points during our communications he got confused a couple times with similar problems with other customers. So if you are one of his victims, please feel free to contact me. And if you are looking for a riad, there are tens, if not hundreds of way better options available in Marrakech.