What a beautiful boutique hotel right on the shores of Lake Toba! The rooms are clean and spacious with comfortable beds and amazing views from the balcony. Staff are very friendly and always helpful, I had a wonderful welcome at the pier when I arrived by boat! The breakfast was exceptional, very tasty, with fresh fruit, juice, cake, and choice of Western or Indonesian main dish. Lovely views of the garden, pool and lake. Had dinner there a few times too and it was always delicious, the chef and his team really know how to prepare Indonesian and European dishes. Can highly recommend staying here when visiting Lake Toba! it’s also centrally located in Tuktuk and easy to walk to shops and restaurants. The tour offered by the hotel to visit a local Batak village was incredibly special and unique and should not be missed.

Actually everything was great 😊

Staff was very friendly and helpful. Rooms and other facilities clean and well kept. Breakfast was very good, altough personally I’d prefer for some less healthy option as well.

So many stairs that you can’t avoid…can’t recommend to anyone having mobility problems. Please add Bintang to a selection of beers.

The whole staff and manager were great! I asked for all the names; Andrew, Evril, Uli, Tresna, Sarma, Sinta, Falisha, Pritz, Louis, Mahendra, Lasta,Renta and Dala and I am sure I forgot somebody! They gave us information we needed, fantastic tips what to do, they served us our Christmasdinner and prepared a lovely breakfast. The rooms are very clean and we felt extremely welcome! Thank you for this great stay in this wonderful island!!

There were guests doing a lot of fireworks what we did not enjoy at all during our dinner. That was a bit bad luck for us. The rooms were a bit noisy because of the floor which is marble. But that was all!

Great little hotel. Our son loved the slide and the pool. We loved the canoe which was free. View was gorgeous. Breakfast was lovely- full buffet if more than 9 rooms booked

All of the staff were super friendly and efficient. I liked the fact that this is not a huge place and I got the feeling of being amongst a group of happy family members with the staff. Food and drinks were great. We arranged a driver and rented a couple of scooters through the hotel. All very affordable and went smoothly. The grounds are very nice and views of the beautiful Lake Toba, hills and waterfall magnificent.

I did not find the bed very comfortable and there were no insect screens on the windows or mosquito nets over the bed. I was reluctant to leave a window open overnight so the room was a bit stuffy when trying to sleep.

It was a difficult hotel to evaluate, not because of the hotel, but because of the expectations. I thought that the island of Samosir was a paradise, with lots of nature. The island of Samosir is not what I thought. It is already very touristy, inhabited and/or cultivated along the entire coast. The quality of the water for swimming can be questionable. If you leave the hotel you will not be in the middle of nature, but inside a large, scattered town. On foot you can only go to restaurants. The hotel offers transfer and tour services, massages and others. I took a tuktuk ride on a very bad beach. Dirty water, dirty bathroom. I did not stay on the beach. The good tour was "Traces of your ancestors/proud to be Batak". I went to a viewpoint in the mountains, an open-air museum with Batak houses and royal tombs and hot sulfurous hot springs. Price equivalent to 80 US dollars. Expensive but worth it, unlike the beach in the tuktuk. You have to insist with the driver where you want to go. As for the hotel, the location is already described and makes you dependent on the hotel for all activities. The room is large and the mattress is good. There is no air conditioning, they use a fan. Luckily the region is not very hot as is normal in Sumatra. They justify this by saying that they are committed to the environment and that air conditioning accumulates bacteria. I stayed for 4 days and the fan solved the problem in 3 days. One day I slept badly due to the heat. The fact is that fans save energy and this policy of not using air conditioning is questionable Attentive staff. The transfer from Medan worked well and they follow everything via WhatsApp. Delicious breakfast. The care taken in preparing the food and the artisanal method stand out the most. After all, making bruschetta with pesto sauce, chia pudding with pitaya, sandwiches and homemade natural yogurt takes time and care.

The staff, from the moment we arrived until the moment we left were fantastic, friendly and went out of their way to be helpful. The hotel in general and room were really clean and this extended to how the property itself looked. Comfortable bed with linen replaced daily. The location is central Tuk Tuk, so right in the middle of what little there is to do in that area. Breakfast was either buffet-style or pre-ordered a la carte, both very good in terms of variety and quantity. The rooms facing the lake have either a great view or some view, depending upon whether-or-not the room you end up with has one of those artificial Sumatranese high pitches in front of it. This one is impossible to quantify but Zoe's felt safe and the staff honest, so we had no lingering concerns about leaving stuff in the room. Tea and coffee making facilities are provided in a communal area on each floor.

There's nothing we didn't like, but there are 4 floors of accommodation (the ground floor is restuarant and pool access), starting at the second level, with reception on the 3rd floor, putting it on the same level as the "main" (and only) road that runs past the back of the hotel; there is no elevator and the stairs one must use are quite steep and covered in high-gloss tile, so be very careful, especially if your walking is compromised. Not that we had one, but if your room doesn't face the lake, you get to look at a hillside. Shampoo/body wash combination is provided but bring your own toothbrush/paste, razor.

Zoe's truly is a paradise. The location is perfect, the staff and so lovely and helpful and provide excellent tips for dining and sightseeing, nothing is too hard and the rooms are extremely clean and large and so well priced. We loved having the balcony and viewing the lake. Lake access is excellent and the pool was good too. The breakfast was really nice and in a great location in the hotel.

The only thing we would say was that our room was a little stuffy with the heat and while having a small fan helped, it wasn't completely comfortable. But we don't really blame the hotel for that, it's just something to be aware of as air-conditioning is rare at accommodation in Lake Toba.

It was a difficult hotel to evaluate, not because of the hotel, but because of the expectations. I thought that the island of Samosir was a paradise, with lots of nature. The island of Samosir is not what I thought. It is already very touristy, inhabited and/or cultivated along the entire coast. The quality of the water for swimming can be questionable. If you leave the hotel you will not be in the middle of nature, but inside a large, scattered town. On foot you can only go to restaurants. The hotel offers transfer and tour services, massages and others. I took a tuktuk ride on a very bad beach. Dirty water, dirty bathroom. I did not stay on the beach. The good tour was "Traces of your ancestors/proud to be Batak". I went to a viewpoint in the mountains, an open-air museum with Batak houses and royal tombs and hot sulfurous hot springs. Price equivalent to 80 US dollars. Expensive but worth it, unlike the beach in the tuktuk. You have to insist with the driver where you want to go. As for the hotel, the location is already described and makes you dependent on the hotel for all activities. The room is large and the mattress is good. There is no air conditioning, they use a fan. Luckily the region is not very hot as is normal in Sumatra. They justify this by saying that they are committed to the environment and that air conditioning accumulates bacteria. I stayed for 4 days and the fan solved the problem in 3 days. One day I slept badly due to the heat. The fact is that fans save energy and this policy of not using air conditioning is questionable Attentive staff. The transfer from Medan worked well and they follow everything via WhatsApp. Delicious breakfast. The care taken in preparing the food and the artisanal method stand out the most. After all, making bruschetta with pesto sauce, chia pudding with pitaya, sandwiches and homemade natural yogurt takes time and care.

The best way I can describe Zoë's is to say that it's an absolute pleasure to stay there. If you have made it as far as lake Toba I hope you aren't expecting a western style business hotel. With that said, the standards here are high and everything most travellers might want is available. What makes it a real pleasure is the staff who are so happy and friendly that you can't avoid being happy yourself. We were lucky enough to meet one of the owners who was also very friendly and helpful and explained some of the background of the hotel. They are really trying to do the right things for their staff and the local area. Just another reason to choose Zoe's. Do choose a lake view room because the view is amazing. We didn't want to leave. That's our best recommendation!