"Sadly our recent visit will be our last.
We booked 2 Esencia Bali Bed suites half board as usual, which is an expensive week. Sadly, the food in both restaurants was disappointing and standards have definitely dropped. The ‘orange’ juice in the main restaurant out of the machine was quite frankly a disgrace and many customers have complained in previous reviews. The orange juice in the One Restaurant was better, although the usual fresh juice machine wasn’t working all week, and it did have a watered down taste when supplied in jugs.
The bottled water you buy at meal times is now ‘filtered’ normal water through a filtration system we were told, and you could really taste the difference - it was quite unpleasant.
The worst change is the vegetarian options in the One Restaurant. We were only offered 1 dish per meal, which on several days was dreadful and could not be eaten. The vegetable tart in particular which was provided, looked and tasted like cold scrambled eggs pressed down with grated carrots and was inedible. We went into town many evenings after service, just to have a nice supper.
The majority of the staff taking orders did not speak or understand English, and trying to order meals - particularly at breakfast was quite challenging. Omelettes were sent back several times as the ingredients were wrong and always seemed to contain ham.
The staff were very friendly and we recognised many of the same faces again. However there was 1 waiter who we saw regularly in the One Restaurant who we found quite aggressive. We overheard him speak to an elderly couple on the table next to us, in a very unfriendly and unhelpful manner. They had asked him to chase up their main course as they had waited for over an hour, and he simply told them he was just a waiter and it was nothing to do with him. We then watched the same person walk over a ladies jacket that had fallen off the back of her chair 3 times.
The entertainment was ok, but again the sound system does not work well at the back of the room and one of the staff told us you can only hear properly if you sit right in the front.
Our accommodation had been booked several months ago on a ‘pay on arrival’ basis. I had emailed the hotel several times to request that one of our rooms did not look directly over the restaurant seating area. I had said we would need confirmation of this before payment was made on arrival.
At check in - again no Esencia check in desk, I asked where our rooms were. A young girl pointed on a map to our 2 rooms and payment was made. When we were then shown to our rooms - guess what, we had been allocated exactly the room we didn’t want.
A telephone call was made back to reception and after many conversations we were asked to go back after breakfast the next morning which we did. We were however, then told to come back after 1.30 and we could move. We had plans for the whole of that day and couldn’t get back in time, so we had to leave any potential move and just used the 2nd room for storage. We appreciate you cannot specifically book a room like some hotels, but we did feel very cross that we had been lied to at the reception desk on check in.
The cleaning is excellent here and our room was kept spotless.
Sadly we will not be returning."
