My wife and I, both of us senior citizens from the Midlands in the UK, booked the hotel for a week through Jet2, and it turned out to be not too bad a place to call home for a week.
The hotel is in a great location, set between the strip (just far enough away that you don’t get all of the noise) and the old town, and it’s also close to the seafront. I’d say that it pretty much is in the ideal location for access to all that Benidorm has to offer.
We had a coach transfer from the airport to the hotel, but something to be aware of is that the coach drops you off in C. Lepanto and you then have a 20 metre walk up Av. de Emilio Romero, which is a bit of an incline, with your luggage to the main entrance. It would be a bit of a bad start to anyone’s holiday if they are in anyway infirm or a bit immobile. Taxis can get up to the main entrance, just not coaches.
Check-in was completed in no time at all, and we were extremely lucky in that our room was ready so we could go straight up to the eight floor and get settled in. Now seems to be a good time to discuss the lifts. There’s three of them, but throughout our stay only two ever worked. Goodness only knows how the lifts are programmed, but we would wait for ages as lifts went past on their way to other floors, so I can only think that it’s a first come first served basis that controls the lift, in that the computer registers a button press and that’s where it’s heading next, even if it has to pass floors with guests waiting on its way there. To say that they were a bugbear throughout our stay in this hotel would be an understatement, and as we were on such a high floor walking up and down the stairs was definitely a no-go!
The room itself was spacious, but really could have done with a bit of TLC, and given that the hotel is meant to be 4-star (the hotel states on its website that it is a ‘4-star Superior Hotel in Benidorm’) I don’t think that this room or in fact the hotel was up to this standard. Now we’ve been travelling the World for over forty years and have stayed in hundreds of different types of accommodations, and I would say that this hotel on the whole did not live up to our expectations from us staying in other four-star hotels, and it certainly isn’t ‘Superior’. The furniture in the room was old and worn, and really didn’t create a great first impression. To add to this, one of the very heavy wardrobe doors came off whilst my wife was opening it, and she was struggling to hold it up as it bore down on her, so it was lucky that I was in the room and could manhandle it off her and prop it against the wall (see attached photo). I went down to Reception to tell them and didn’t even get any apology, only that they would send maintenance up to sort it out. The non-English speaking maintenance guy duly arrived and after putting the door back on and fiddling around with the fixings for quite some time, he began to try and explain something in Spanish. After using the translator on my smartphone, it turns out that it was my wife’s fault for not opening the doors in the correct order, which I found to be quite unbelievable. I refer you back to the fact that we’ve been in literally hundreds of accommodations, many with this type of sliding doors wardrobe, and this is the first time that my wife has had one come off whilst opening it, risking serious injury on the first day of our holiday.
Anyway, the room had everything that we required for our stay. Two large comfortable beds (we slept fairly well during our stay, helped by the fact that this hotel is away from the strip, so no noise from late-night revellers, although it could be quite noisy when the wind moved the glass panes on the balcony surround, due to the fact that they aren’t tight within the fixings), good quality bedding, large flat screen TV with some English channels, free aircon (this was totally useless as it was quite warm some of the days and we couldn’t get it to blow out cold air, which was the same for our friends staying in this hotel), kettle with brew making facilities, fridge, digital safe (chargeable), hairdryer, table and two chairs, plenty of electric sockets, bedside tables with drawers, large wardrobe with plenty of storage space.
The ensuite was large with both a bath and shower, although the bath is quite high and not so easy to get in and out of. There is also a wash hand basin set in a large top with plenty of space to put all of your stuff, bidet, toilet, huge mirror, hairdryer, plug sockets (yes, they did have electrical sockets in the bathroom), plenty of shower gel/shampoo/hand soap/conditioner and a heated towel rail. The lighting is not too bad. The towels were some of the worst that we’ve had in any accommodation that we’ve stayed in. We had the towels changed quite a few times during our week long stay and they were always clean, but most had seen better days, and some were almost transparent they were that thin. They were also not soft and fluffy by any stretch of the imagination, and you could exfoliate easily using the hotel’s towels.
The room was kept immaculate throughout our stay, as was the hotel in general.
The WiFi was free, but sometimes not all that useable. I tested the download speed at 11Mbps in the room, which wouldn’t be all that bad, but it was a bit flaky to say the least and sometimes I could browse, sometimes not. You certainly would have problems trying to stream anything, and scrolling through Facebook was a bit of a task.
There are beach towels on offer which can be hired from the Spa, and you can swap them whenever you want. They’re a fair size and not too bad quality. When you’ve finished with them for good you get a card from the Spa which you take to Reception to get all of the deposit back.
We were on a half-board plan, as upgrading to all-inclusive was going to double the cost of the holiday, and as I am tea-total and the wife doesn’t drink that much we thought was just not good value for money. All of the meals weren’t bad at all as there was an amazing amount of choice. Now I’m a really such a fussy eater and I always found plenty that I liked. The main problem was that the food could be less than hot on occasions. Now we got into dinner almost first in the queue most evenings and the food wasn’t particularly hot even at this stage of the proceedings. It was therefore lucky that there was a microwave available to pop anything in for a minute or so. To make this review fully rounded I’ll also state that my wife didn’t find the warmth of the food as much as a problem as myself, and her exact words were ‘you’ve got an asbestos mouth’.
Now onto a real bone of contention. The allowance of the general public to pay for meals at the hotel. We were warned by other guests from the UK that had stayed at the hotel on many occasions about this, and they told us that Valentines Day would be a bit of a nightmare with many people from outside being allowed to pay for a meal at the hotel, and that they would appear en-masse for dinner. We duly started to queue up early outside the restaurant as these live-in guests instructed the evening before, to ensure that we were able to get our choices of meal and in fact get a seat. As we were also told, these outsiders tried to jostle their way to the front of the queue and that did happen. Now I find it hard to believe that guests staying in the hotel are treated in this way, and to me it would seem reasonable for these outsiders to be instructed to arrive half an hour or so after the restaurant opens for the hotel guests, to allow live-in guests to have their meals first, prior to the onslaught of these others from outside the hotel.
The pool area was great with plenty of good quality sun loungers, but as usual, even though we got out quite early (eight o’clockish), there were many loungers with towels draped over them even at this early hour, with their owners nowhere to be seen. Some of them even had the cheek to move other loungers away from the area around them to make sure that they had their own little inclusive enclave. We sat on our loungers for more than a couple of hours with some of these ‘reserved’ loungers not having a soul sitting on them. This of course is not unusual, and very much the way of the World nowadays, but some hotels are so much better at policing these entitled people’s reserved loungers – removing towels that you’ve had to pay a deposit for is always a good way of dealing with such highborn attitudes.
We never saw any of the entertainment, and there’s a reason for this – drink’s prices. These are absolutely scandalous. We only had one round of drinks in the hotel, and decided that we would never drink in the bar or entertainment venue again. We were charged almost twelve Euros for a small beer and a Coke, which was served from the tap into a glass full of ice – so literally no Coke. We spent every evening in the same bar on the seafront paying just over six Euros for a large beer and a can of Coke. The hotel should be absolutely ashamed of the bar prices, and they really need to review them as it means that guests that are not on all-inclusive are missing out on relaxing in the hotel with a drink and also the entertainment. To be truthful I felt that the guest that were not on all-inclusive were paying for the guests that were as far as the drinks were concerned, as we encountered quite a few guests who were on all-inclusive absolutely drunk out of their minds – not a good look for those of us that are tea-total.
Finally, the staff. On the whole, apart from the guy I reported the wardrobe door falling off to, they were highly professional, friendly and welcoming. Most walked around with a smile on their faces and greeted you like a valuable guest.
To summarise; I don’t really think that this hotel can be classed as 4-star Superior Hotel, especially given that we’ve stayed in more than a few 4-star hotels that could knock this hotel into a cocked hat, and even some 3-star hotels, but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t enjoy our stay here, as we did. I’m not sure that we would stay here again given the price we paid for half-board, but if the price was right then we would as there are far more positives than negatives about this hotel. As stated, we came across a lot of guests that had stayed in this hotel many times before, so it can’t be all that bad.
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