O2 Beach Club & Spa by Ocean Hotels

We visited the O2 Beach Club & Spa mid-April 2026 for a 10 night stay. It wasn’t so much O2 as O-dear..... We are seasoned travellers, and have been fortunate enough to experience really great and true 5* luxury and service widely and often, unfortunately, this time wasn’t so great. It is with reluctance we write this review, but in the hope it spares others from a below par experience and gives you food for thought to spend your hard earned money with a resort that appreciates you and has the standards you expect. I’m in no doubt however, the resort will respond rebutting all or most of the comments below, probably with some copy and pasted repost, but everything we comment upon is accurate and true. Staff Attitude and Service I’ve never seen so many staff numbers for a small resort. Most of them mill around in small groups, but in the main, staff do not smile at guests or even acknowledge them the majority of the time. They seem generally demotivated and do not want to be there. I hate to say it, but the overall impression is that they are untrained and lazy. When staff do talk to you, they all seem to whisper, and it’s incredibly difficult to hear what they are actually saying. It is also very difficult to recognise who are managers and who are not, unlike other 5* resorts. We often witnessed staff using their mobile phones, clearly making personal calls and scrolling on social media during the day. Often we would watch the pool/beach attendants amusing themselves by playing board games or football on the beach, with no guests around or invited. Even if you asked the pool/beach attendants for help, there was a real reluctance to assist with anything. We witnessed the pool/beach attendants hiding towels in a room they used (which bizarrely was a guest room on a pool-access level), then using those towels in the mornings to reserve sunbeds for their favourite guests — or, dare I say, the most generous guests. The waiter poolside drinks service does not start until 11am, so it’s quite a while if you’re down on the sunbeds by 8am. That service is totally hit-and-miss; some of the poolside waiters are excellent and others you see once per day. There appears to be no real consistency in training or enthusiasm and zero management of them or standards. On at least two occasions we saw staff manning the Oasis coffee lounge bar eating the sandwiches supplied for guests. To our disbelief, one member of staff ate a sandwich whilst making a guest a coffee. Most 5* resorts we have stayed at have lifts specifically for the use of staff. O2 did not appear to have those — or at least the amount of time spent waiting for lifts suggested otherwise. It was common to be in a lift with a member of staff carrying luggage or cleaning trolleys. Without being too unkind, when staff are working for hours in a hot environment, a lift is a claustrophobic place to share with someone who could use a deodorant top-up. Accommodation and Rooms The room was nice with a great view. Unfortunately the bedroom had no natural light; it did have two windows, but these seem to face the corridor and have been covered up with some type of film. However, the film had not been fitted fully, so there was a permanent light around the edge of the film. We did find the apartment floor was often dirty. Although it may have been swept, it seemed not to have been mopped. We more often than not came back to the room in the afternoon and there would be staff cleaning and maintenance trolleys abandoned in the accommodation hallways, with no staff to be seen. A real eyesore and frankly dangerous leaving cleaning chemicals and paints etc. that children could easily access – there is not much for children to actually do as a side note, so if you have children, avoid the O2 unless you want them bored completely for your stay. When we arrived the room was ready and well-situated (beach-facing on the 4th floor of the older building). It was overall in good order; we did, however, need to wipe down dust on the wardrobe shelves before using them. Even though it is an all-inclusive resort, the room service menu is included within this (which is good, but a very limited menu). There is, however, a $20 charge to bring it to your room — which, from either of the two restaurants (not Oro), would take someone one minute to deliver. Dining Experience The restaurants Elements & Blue Fin, the main restaurants used for breakfast, lunch and dinner, offer pretty much an identical menu every day, with the odd twist here and there, a mere token, no real effort is made. If you’re staying for any longer than a week, the food is repetitive and boring. It is also nowhere near the quality you would expect from a 5* resort; it is actually 4* at best, often even below that standard. The Elements buffet offering is an absolute embarrassment — it is tiny, with no real variety, and the cook station repeatedly couldn’t even make an omelette. On that note, there does not appear to be any expertise on the culinary front; they seem to employ cooks rather than chefs. There is one guy in a grey chef’s apron who periodically tours guests’ tables in a Gordon Ramsay style, but he’s clueless, genuinely. Lots of the food appears to be bought-in and pre-prepared, then simply heated up — really, really disappointing. Even when the waiters or restaurant manager ask “how is the food?” and you reply “atrocious”, there was no action taken or even any acknowledgement of how bad the food is. The token beach BBQ was abandoned at 7pm one evening, as all the guests waited for food, as it was a bit windy and rain forecast – rain had been forecast for days, so O2 waited until 50+ guests arrived to then transfer the pre-cooked food (so not really a BBQ) back to the Elements restaurant. It was then a disaster with all the guests trying to fill their plates with terrible food at the same time – we left. On a positive note, the Oro à la carte restaurant is 5*. It is the best on resort, but the menu is identical at all dinner services, so after the third visit it becomes far too repetitive. It is, however, very good and genuinely puts the other restaurants to shame. A note however: the resort is insistent that men wear long trousers and a shirt with a collar — a bit old-fashioned really. Pools, Beach and Sunbeds There are huge signs everywhere saying “ABSOLUTELY NO RESERVING OF SUNBEDS” — but the resort does not enforce this policy whatsoever. For the 10 days we were there, every single morning most sunbeds around the pool areas were “reserved” with towels and guests personal items (books, sun cream etc.) by 6am! By 7.30am you had no chance of a sunbed around the pool areas. It was common to see no one using these reserved beds until lunchtime. You may, however, be able to get a sunbed on the beach, but there were too few umbrellas (far too many umbrellas were in fact broken anyway). So if you don’t want a sleep-in or you want to get roasted alive, this is the resort for you. Towels often were not available until after 9am, so guests were taking towels the day before to their rooms to facilitate an early-morning reservation — commonly witnessed by staff who said and did nothing. When challenging managers on the whole sunbed fiasco, they were not interested. The only manager who seemed to take notice was a young lady on our day 7 who enquired about our stay and poolside experience. We explained about the sunbed-reserving nonsense and her immediate action was to berate one of the pool/beach attendants and assure us we would have a sunbed “saved” for us at 8am the next day. We did not take her up on the offer; she clearly had missed the point of the discussion. When we say “pools” it is pushing the use of the word, really. There are two pool-type areas, no actual separate guest pool. There is a swim-up area, so you are constantly swimming past someone’s patio area, and there is a pool-access area, again immediately next to guest patios. We were on the 4th floor so had a perfect view of the pools. In the 10 days we were there, we only saw the pools being cleaned twice. From our vantage point, the pools were cloudy and looked basically dirty. We only witnessed the pools being treated with chemicals once during our entire stay. Generally pool dosing is measured out and test samples taken; this particular treatment consisted of a very young pool attendant walking around with two plastic chemical bottles (different colours, so one might assume different chemicals), simply pouring the entire contents, unmeasured, into the pool water whilst guests were actually in the pool. I’m sure this is not the way to treat or dose public pools. The poolside toilets (one down a set of stairs and two through the Blue Fin restaurant buffet area — bizarre places to locate poolside toilets) during the day were always dirty. There did not seem to be any rota of checking or cleaning them and they were used by staff as well as guests. I personally walked into a cubicle that was unlocked and a barman was sitting there on his phone using the toilet. He left (eventually) but did not wash his hands, immediately returning to make some unfortunate person a cocktail. Entertainment and Amenities The nightly entertainment at the Elements restaurant was pretty good, often 7.30–10pm — a singer or musician — so that was refreshing. The resort shop is small and lightly stocked with the normal holiday essentials. The only issue is that it is often closed at the times it says it is open. So we found we used the small mini-market opposite the resort, which was great; we even bought lunch from there a few days to vary the food. Says something when the mini-market food counter was actually better than Elements buffet. Check-out Experience We had made the booking many months in advance and, because of our late flight time back to the UK, our travel agent had asked for a late check-out. We also asked for a late check-out when we arrived and two days before leaving. We were told by a grumpy front-desk guy that we would need to physically come back to the front desk on the morning of check-out at 7am to ask. Reluctantly we did this (having never ever been asked to do this at any resort ever before). You can imagine our surprise (not) when an equally grumpy front-desk guy said the room was needed by 11am and no later, and we could use a complimentary room to shower for 30 minutes before leaving late that afternoon. I offered to pay to use another room for the day; he said he would make an enquiry with his manager when she came in and WhatsApp me. He never did. We left our room on departure day at 11am (check-out time) and as we opened the door there was a cleaning maid literally standing in our doorway. It didn’t take much to work out they have a schedule of who is leaving on what day, so it was an opportune time to look for a tip. We had never seen her before. So we used the complimentary room to get ready to leave but were allocated 30 minutes only for two people to shower and change, which was quite a rush. Again, we experienced an overall feeling of staff being unhelpful, almost deliberately awkward — a real and tangible dislike of the guests. Overall Impression We spoke to quite a few fellow guests during our stay; all or almost all voiced similar experiences and issues. One Canadian guy summed his stay and the resort up as “six pounds of cr*p on a one-pound beach” — hard to argue with that sentiment really. The room was nice with a great view and the Oro restaurant was genuinely excellent, but these positives were sadly outweighed by the many issues across staff motivation, food quality, pool maintenance, sunbed chaos and general guest experience. As for *’s, well categorically NOT 5* and any operator selling it as such has not done their due diligence. It’s maybe a 4* at best in some categories, but often slipping to a standard below that. Its a real shame, as it could be a great resort, the issues cascade from the top down – poor management, low or no standards and what can only be described when leaving of a genuine aversion to the guests. O2 seem to have forgotten what’s important. Read less