"I want to start with some background. My family and I visited this hotel on numerous occasions before its takeover by Portaventura World in December 2023, and we always had fantastic experiences. We returned to the Dorada Palace this year (now renamed Ponient Dorada Palace) for the first time since the takeover.
To say it has gone downhill massively would be a severe understatement.
While the hotel website advertises major renovations and modernization, the marketing images are misleading. In person, it looks like a cheap makeover designed to cover up worn areas rather than the complete renovation you are led to believe. We booked based on past experiences, but the current reality is a major letdown.
🟢 The Pros:
• Park Tickets: 2-day tickets to Portaventura Park and Ferrari Land were included in our stay.
• Shuttle Service: A free, convenient shuttle service to and from Portaventura World is provided.
• Cleanliness: The rooms themselves were clean and have received some basic modernization.
• The Staff: Every staff member we interacted with was polite and incredibly hard-working. They are clearly overworked, so my issues lie entirely with management, not the frontline team.
🔴 The Cons:
• Terrible Food & Poor Restaurant Layout. The food was genuinely awful and very limited. The restaurant is a large room with tightly packed, back-to-back seating. Mysteriously, staff insist on seating everyone right next to each other, leaving half the room entirely empty.
The buffet setup is highly inefficient. There is only one central island for the entire restaurant, a third of which is dedicated to a children's section with a live cooking area in the corner and the dessert Island in the other.
You are left with basic, low-quality pool-bar food (fries, burgers, hot dogs). Trays are rarely refilled on time, leaving guests with even fewer choices. Furthermore, the advertised "theme nights" are a gimmick; the only things that change are the decorations and an AI-inspired billboard outside the restaurant area, the food itself remains exactly the same in my experience.
• Excessive Queuing... If you love to queue, this is the hotel for you. You will queue for ages at check-in, queue again at the pool bar because there are no self-service soft drink or beer machines for All-Inclusive guests, then queue around the tiny buffet island at dinner, and queue again in a separate queue at the restaurant bar just to get a drink with your meal.
Once the pool bar closes, you move to the interior bar where you will queue yet again, only to be served beer in a tiny 330ml glass in the evenings. You spend more of your holiday standing in lines than relaxing.
Tip for Future Guests: The hotel operates on a token system for plastic cups, which you must carry everywhere. If you forget your cup, they will not serve you, even with an All-Inclusive wristband. However, if you go to Portaventura Park and buy a drink there, they provide it in a 500ml reusable cup, which if you bring it back to the hotel with you the hotel staff will fill it, saving you multiple trips to the bar.
• Deceptive "Kitchen" Apartments & Hidden Costs. We paid extra for a 1-bedroom apartment with kitchen facilities so we could prepare food for the kids outside of standard dining hours. In the past, these came fully stocked. To our surprise, while the hobs and microwave were there, management had stripped out every single plate, cup, pan, cutlery item, and even the kettle. You couldn't even make a cup of tea.
When I asked about a kettle, I was told they no longer supply them and instead use an outside hire company with a lengthy price sheet. We ended up buying a travel kettle at a local supermarket for €11, which was significantly cheaper than renting one. Furthermore, irons have been removed from the rooms; you must now pay €3 for 20 minutes to use a terrible, burnt iron in the basement laundry room on a lopsided wall mounted ironing board.
• Poor Maintenance. The toilets near the entertainment area smelled of raw sewage, and the soap dispensers were broken off the walls. In the cubicles, sharp metal toilet roll holders were left hanging open which resulted in a member of our party actually cutting their arm on one by the pool toilets. Further maintenance issues was an air conditioning vent near the dessert station in the restaurant is visibly bulging from the ceiling due to a water leak. It looks ready to collapse, yet management continues to seat families directly beneath it. Another vent by the restaurant bar drips condensation and is developing black mold. There are cracked tiles around the pool that could easily cut open a foot, and the children's play area is so run-down that it sat completely abandoned anytime I seen it.
• Sun Lounger Shortages & Pool Cleanliness.
The hotel accommodates roughly 1,000 to 1,300 guests at peak times but only provides around 300 sun loungers. Staff block access to the pool area until 9:00 AM, leading to a massive horde of guests waiting at the doors to sprint for a bed. The loungers themselves are dated and worn out. We gave up entirely and just sat at the pool bar chairs. Because guests leave food wrappers behind and there is minimal ground staff cleaning up during the day, the pool area frequently gets messy and attracts pigeons who are trying to eat the left over food.
• Room Comfort & Noise, while spacious, the rooms are not soundproofed at all; we could hear neighboring conversations perfectly clear, especially through the bathroom walls. Additionally, the air conditioning struggled in the 30–31°C heat. (Counterintuitively, the AC worked noticeably better when the fan speed was manually set to "1" rather than "2" or "3" setting on the fan controller).
Final Verdict:
Knowing how brilliant this hotel used to be, this stay was an incredibly disappointing and an expensive letdown. Management is running this property into the ground and exploiting an overworked, understaffed team. Salou has plenty of fantastic hotels and unfortunately, this is no longer one of them. We will not be returning and would recommend anyone who is considering this hotel to look elsewhere as it's not worth the money."
