"Overall we had a lovely time at Hotel Angela. The view from our room was great, the room was cleaned everyday very well, though I notice thick thick dust in a vent in the bathroom which I closed so I didn’t have to look at it. Bathroom was slightly dated but shower seemed newer than the other features and was great. The location of the hotel was ideal - right by the beach and plenty of shops. At times it was slightly noisy outside in the evening but this was expected and my partner brought earplugs to account for this. The pool bar was great and offered 2 for 1 drinks from 12-1pm meaning 2 pints for €6. The staff were friendly, though I caught a weird vibe from what I think was the manager of the pool bar on our final day - she seemed overly firm some of the staff.
We struggled with the food (half board) as my partner and I are vegetarian - the options were limited but doable. My partner, however, had a more difficult time because as well as being vegetarian she also has a sulphite allergy and though the food was labelled, there were some inconsistencies which made meal times slightly anxiety provoking. For instance, on our first morning the baked beans at breakfast were labelled ‘cooked beans’ which included sulphites so she avoided them, but on the second day the same beans were labelled ‘beans with tomato’ which had a different set of allergens, not including sulphites. Similarly, on a couple of occasions there were two identical bowls of onion on the salad bar, both labelled ‘onion’ but one specifying sulphites and the other not. Also, some items were consistently not labelled at all including the table of bread rolls and bowls of salads/olives (things that can often contain sulphites), and one night there was a special sushi bar that was completely unlabelled.
On top of the poor management of allergy labels, though, she also had very little choice in what she could eat because on most days, almost the entire offering of the hot food bar contained sulphites. On every day bar one, the vegetarian option contained sulphites, so from the beginning she already had to choose to eat fish, but on 4 of our 7 days the fish option also contained sulphites, as well as all the other meat options, so even though she shouldn’t have to sacrifice one dietary requirement for another, she was literally unable to even do that. On the worst day, she could only eat a plate of plain boiled rice with lettuce and cucumber. As well as being incredibly frustrating for managing her allergy, the amount of sulphites across the entire food offering (being a preservative used in tinned goods and pre-prepared and packaged vegetables) strongly indicates that a lot of the food isn’t fresh, especially the salad options. One caveat, though, is that we could have alerted the staff and asked that they specially make something for her to eat, but because it’s her first time travelling abroad with this allergy she felt a bit too anxious to do so. That said, I feel like the larger responsibility should fall on the kitchen to make sure that a single allergy isn’t present in every single dish they offer. It would be different if she had a few food allergies which would make this more difficult for the kitchen to organize, but to offer an entire range of dishes including paella, curry, fish, roasted meat, chips, vegetables, salad, and soup that all contain the same allergy (and one that is often avoidable with fresh ingredients!) seems like a huge oversight.
Also, just to note, they would benefit from implementing a system in the morning to stop people putting towels on sun loungers at 9am and then not returning until much later on. We would at times go to the pool area at 11am and have to walk right to the back on the sun loungers despite there being very few people there. We always got a bed, but it was just annoying walking past bed after bed with towels but not a person in sight for another 2 hours."
