I stayed at this hostel back in Christmas and New year in Dec 2008 to Jan 2009. I had a wonderful time and a great experience staying here first time round, that I decided to come back again this time in May 2011.

In spite of some of the bad things I previously heard on both hostelworld and tripadvisor about how this hostel had gone downhill, I still decided to check it out for a night or two to see how things went. I had heard bad things like the staff just "staring" at the guests and being very rude, lack of English, ants crawling all over the place, and even rats!

Yet on my second visit here, I never experienced any of the above. The current management have only been at this hostel for one month, and they actually know the management who were running this hostel when I was here in 2008/2009. So I am hoping that business will pick up once again for the Red Palm.

I found the hostel once again to be very clean, the staff were very polite and friendly and spoke reasonably good English. As I mentioned, I planned only to stay for two nights, but I had such a nice time that after one night, I booked up the remaining four nights to extend my stay in this hostel. The place was practically empty when I first arrived, but it quickly got full after me staying one or two nights there.

So once again, I would certainly recommend this hostel to anybody who stays in Kota Kinabalu.