The hotel looks incredible on Instagram, but unfortunately, the reality of staying here was a completely different story. Beneath the polished photos and marketing, the quality, service and overall experience were hugely disappointing.
Here’s why:
1. The quality and service are nowhere near what you would expect.
There is virtually no service around the pool. If you want a drink, you have to get up and go to the bar yourself. Even more disappointing, the drinks are terrible, and staff openly admit they use cheap pouring alcohol. The non-alcoholic options are just as poor, with coffees, mocktails and other drinks tasting artificial and cheap.
For a hotel selling an ultra-inclusive experience, this is simply not good enough.
2. The pool food is consistently stone cold.
You cannot actually order food around the pool, yet you are randomly offered food that is stone cold. Poolside food should be one of the easiest things to get right.
Combined with the poor drink quality and lack of service, the entire poolside experience fell well below expectations.
3. Even the sun loungers are uncomfortable.
From a distance, they may look fine, but as soon as you sit on them, you slide straight off. It might sound like a small thing, but when the pool is supposed to be a major part of the holiday experience, even the basics matter.
4. Restaurant bookings and the treatment of guests are unacceptable.
Despite staying at the hotel, we were unable to secure restaurant bookings. Yet an apparently Instagram-worthy family arrived and managed to get a table for 20.
It is difficult not to question the fairness of the system when some guests appear to receive a completely different level of access and treatment. All paying guests should be treated equally.
5. “Ultra-inclusive” feels like a marketing term rather than reality.
The reduced restaurant menus leave you questioning what is actually ultra-inclusive about the experience. Limited choice, poor-quality drinks and consistently average food do not reflect the premium experience the hotel appears to advertise.
6. Basic room comfort, cleanliness and maintenance were disappointing.
We experienced issues with the lighting in our room, with all the lights switching on at around 1.30 am every night and waking us up. Not ideal when you have young children in the room who then wake up too.
There was also an unpleasant smell around the restaurant, and the majority of the bathrooms we encountered smelled awful. General cleanliness and maintenance were further let down by work taking place around the resort, which affected the overall atmosphere.
7. The water facilities were not as advertised.
The slides were not working during half-term, with no prior communication to guests. When travelling with children during a school holiday, this is important information that should be communicated before arrival, not left for guests to discover themselves.
We only booked around a week before our stay, so this should have been mentioned on the website or communicated by email when our booking was confirmed.
There was also the bizarre experience of children playing in the SOL pool, only for the pool to suddenly fill with sand, forcing everyone to leave before it was closed for the rest of the day.
These are not the kinds of surprises families expect when paying for a holiday, particularly when an incident like this raises concerns about the cleanliness and safety of the pool.
8. The children’s facilities were particularly disappointing.
The kids’ club for younger children was closed, leaving the teen room as an unsuitable alternative for little ones. There was no one actively engaging or playing with the children, which defeats the purpose of having a kids’ club in the first place.
My very outgoing four-year-old called to be picked up after just 40 minutes and told me, “I never want to go to that kids’ club again.”
That says a lot.
Overall, the biggest issue is the huge gap between the image the hotel sells and the experience it actually delivers.
Everything looks beautiful in photographs, but the reality is let down by poor service, disappointing food and drinks, unavailable facilities, maintenance issues and a lack of attention to the details that make a holiday enjoyable.
For a family holiday, these things matter. We paid for an experience that simply did not live up to the marketing or the expectations created by the hotel.
Honestly, had we booked a longer stay, we would have checked out early. That says everything.
Beautiful for Instagram, disappointing in reality.
