"A Follow up to my DO NOT BOOK REVIEW (which you can find at the bottom of this review)
I urge anyone that is booking this hotel to read my 2 reviews.
GREED AND MORE GREED! After writing my review last week, I woke to a message from the hotel asking if the general manager could call me, yes of course, I thought now we are getting somewhere. The GM called and I had a 15 minute conversation with a very nice man who couldn’t be more sorry about what had happened and completely admitted that the hotel was at fault here and that we had been given the wrong room, a swim up suite, but we were given a room with small pull out sofa beds and not the agreed twin room with proper single beds, that had been booked and paid for, at an extra cost! Along with this and the many other things that happened whilst we were there, he admitted was the fault of the hotel. I had requested when I was checking out that at least our extra charges, which amounted to just under 800 euros should have been taken off, as a small token towards compensating this complete mess up. The GM agreed that this should have happened. I told the GM that at the time of complaining at the hotel to the Ela assistant I had asked several times to see someone more senior, why had he not been there, to this he had no answer, well my answer is , I was obviously not important enough. The GM promised that not only would I be reimbursed the extra charges, but that he would like me to visit Ela EXCELLANCE again so that they could put right all the things that had gone wrong. I told him that there was absolutely no way we would pay thousands of pounds for another holiday there and this empty gesture only went to line their pockets yet again with our hard earned money. Phone call finished and he promised to be in touch once he had spoken with the senior managers. In typical Ela excellence fashion I waited and waited for him to get back to me and had to prompt him after a day of waiting. The response that I received was a flat no to reimbursing the 800 euros, WHAT A GREEDY CORPORATION!!! a drop in the ocean for them, a simple gesture that would have gone some way of putting this right. I can honestly say I am so angry and upset that the holiday we had paid a lot of money for and the first time we had ever done a holiday like this, was so completely ruined by the incompetence of the hotel and then to not actually have the decency to try to make up for it, why would I ever want to go back to your resort?
My First Review
We have just returned from a week stay here. I can honestly say we will never return here again! Although there were some good points to our trip, these really had nothing to do with the hotel and I spent a lot of my week having to go to reception to complain.
Firstly, we were not informed when we first got to the hotel that it was important to book the restaurants, so most evenings we struggled to find anywhere to eat where we didn’t have to pay a supplement charge, on top of our all inclusive charge. We could have eaten in the buffet every night, but i didn’t feel like eating in a canteen every evening when I was on holiday. The other thing that you need to be aware of is the all inclusive alcohol charge, if you like good wine, do not go here, they will absolutely sting you on the sur charge for it.
We had booked a family swim up Lake house suite, which if you look on the website is two bedrooms, one double and one with 2 single beds in. This was obviously an extra charge, but we were happy to pay this. We were happy with the location of this, a nice quiet area, but although not all the rooms were taken for the week, we seemed to have the one where the terrace would be in the shade straight away, it would seem that the nicer ones were saved for none English. The next thing that i noticed about our room was that we had 2 single pull out sofa beds, this was not what was advertised to us. I went to speak to the hotel about this, for them to inform me that they could change the beds, fine I thought, until I returned to the room to find the sofa still in the room and 1 single bed had been shoved up against the window, with no head board and a camp bed had now been put into our room. We were there with my teenager sons, which I had explained to reception, not small children, one of which was classed and paid for as an adult. The next thing they did was to put into the children’s room, what can only be described as a hospital bed. So, we now had a sofa, a single bed and a hospital bed in one room, none of the beds had a head board, so lots of cushions stacked up at the end, to try and make it comfy, as you can imagine the room looked a mess at all time and the hospital bed was not comfy as the slats that the mattress was on were so flimsy, they kept falling out. However, I thought we are on holiday, lets make the most of this and get on with it, I had already wasted a day going to the reception and asking them to change the beds, going back to the room, finding that they were wrong and going again to ask them to sort it out. FYI, the reception was an 8 min or so walk to, so each time, taking precious time away from my holiday. I also had to be the one to remove the camp bed that had been put up in our double room and shift everything back to the original position, they didn’t bother to do this. I left the bed frame and mattress outside the room, it took 2 days for them to come and clear this away. As if this hadn’t been bad enough, on our last day I walked past a suite the same as ours, the door was open, imagine my utter shock when I saw the room that we should have had, that we had booked. A room with a double bed and a room with two proper single beds, a really nice room, compared to the bodge job of ours. I went straight to reception to complain, where I had to wait again to be seen, I was on holiday, I was tired of all this waiting around and back and forth to reception or checking on my phone for answers. I demanded to know why we weren’t in a suite like the one I had just seen, the assistant looked at my pictures of our room and seemed just as confused, as he’d never seen a room like this before with the sofa bed in it. He asked me to leave it with him, this was in the morning, still by the evening, I had not had an answer, so went back to the reception, by this time the assistants had changed over and I had another assistant looking after me, who I had to re go through the whole complaint again. Not only was i seething that I was having to waste my time again, but that my kids had been sleeping on uncomfortable beds all week, when we had paid a small fortune for this holiday. I asked for all our supplement charges to be taken off the bill as we had not had the what we had paid for and that would go towards some compensation for this, it was a flat no, I asked to see the manager, that was met with no as well. As we were leaving the next day, there was not much else to be done about this, but utterly disappointing and angry that this became the main focus of our holiday!
Back to the charges for the restaurants and wine, we kept being told that the restaurants were all fully booked, so had to pay extra charges for eating in the restaurants that we could get into, yet another expense. On top of this the wine really was awful, so we had to pay for the nicer wine, looking at our options we went for the cheapest one, still at 55 euros, only to be told that there was not one single bottle of it anywhere on the resort. The next one up of the type of wine we wanted was 130 euros, double the price. I may be wrong here, but it felt like we were being done over again!
Back to the rooms, which were not cleaned well and sometimes not even cleaned at all, even when I told the assistants our room hadn’t been cleaned, they still didn’t get the job done or made half an effort to do it. We had room service one afternoon, which I cleared up and left outside our room, 2 days went by and they still didn’t clear it, we could have had rats etc, but nobody seemed to care.
All of the above really took the shine off our holiday, it was not how it should have been and having paid a lot of money, we were deeply disappointed. I never got the sur charges taken off, this hotel is utterly ridiculous, take my advice and avoid at all costs!!!!!!!"
