"I stayed in a Privilege room on an all-inclusive basis (€407/night). The hotel pleasantly surprised me and turned out to be better than I had expected in many respects, with a few exceptions I will come to.
— WHAT IS EXCELLENT
The setting, first of all. The buildings and the gardens impressed me: beautiful, elegant and airy. The hotel looks better in person than in photographs, rooms and common areas alike, with a lot more greenery than the pictures suggest. The area around the hotel is fairly empty, so there are no ugly buildings in your line of sight and no noise carrying over from the neighbours, which sets it apart from a good many hotels in the south of the island.
The room is beautiful, modern, spacious and comfortable, and the sea view is magnificent, with nothing ugly anywhere in the frame. Most rooms in the Privilege section seem to have one, except maybe those with direct solarium access. The view from the Privilege pool is splendid too.
Housekeeping is a real strength. The room was made up early every day, the minibar refilled daily, and turndown carried out every evening with real attention to detail, from Lindt chocolates in a little box to the reading light switched on. That amounts to three visits a day, the kind of attention you expect from a genuinely upmarket hotel and do not always get. A fresh flower was waiting in the bathroom on arrival. Whatever else this hotel economises on, it is clearly not housekeeping.
The food is very good, and the way the meal plan works is the hotel's strongest argument. A Privilege room lets you use your meal plan in the à la carte restaurants, not only at the buffet. On all-inclusive, that means your plan covers every restaurant in the hotel, at every meal of the day. Not all of them are open every day, but nothing is closed to you because of your meal plan. Few hotels offer that. Two of the best restaurants, Gaudí and La Brasserie, are reserved for Privilege guests, and on their own they are a very good reason to book on that side.
The lunch buffet is excellent, one of the best I have come across. It is at least as good as, and maybe better than, the dinner buffets at the Vincci Selección La Plantación del Sur, the Tivoli La Caleta or the Jardines de Nivaria in Tenerife, all five-star hotels that cost as much as this one, if not more. The à la carte breakfast is calm and attentively served, with surprisingly good pastries and freshly squeezed orange juice. The other restaurants are all surprisingly good: this is not haute cuisine, but the cooking is genuinely solid.
At the pools, three things deserve credit. There is no music, which to my mind is a good thing, as it would cheapen the place. The bottoms are tiled or lined with soft plastic, so there is none of the rough concrete you find in many hotels, where you graze yourself on the bottom. And the staff seem to enforce the no-reservation policy on loungers, which is much appreciated.
Cancellation conditions, finally, were excellent, which I find very important.
— WHAT COULD BE BETTER
Check-in. The website promises Privilege guests a personalised welcome. A Privilege desk does exist, so I went to it. It was free, with no other guest in front of me, but I was told that they had other guests to take care of and that I would be called later. When I was finally called, it was to another desk, next to the Privilege one. Whatever the desk, check-in felt entirely standard to me, and every guest waiting seemed to be treated the same, Privilege or not. The good thing is that you wait at the bar, over a welcome drink that was excellent and came with snacks and cold towels. The intention is clearly there.
A separate point, and the one that bothered me more: reception took my ID card before I went off to wait at the bar, and kept it for the whole of the wait. Spanish hotels all have to register their guests, and rightly so, but everywhere else the document is handed over at the desk when check-in actually starts, not collected beforehand. Holding on to a guest's identity document for half an hour in order to save a few seconds later does not strike me as a fair trade.
The heat indoors. The temperature in the lobby was no cooler than outside, which is uncomfortable in summertime. Walking out of the heat into a cool lobby is one of the easiest good impressions a hotel can make, and this one passes it up.
It is the same everywhere else: the lobby bar, the restaurants (Sakura excepted, where it was pleasantly cool), and even the spa. In the evening it was actually a relief to leave the lobby bar and step outside, where the temperature was better. Air conditioning does seem to be installed throughout the hotel, the vents are plainly visible, but it does not appear to do much.
The pools. Beyond the view, the Privilege pool area is not especially worthwhile: it is no less busy and no quieter than the rest of the hotel, and its pool is the least comfortable of them all to swim in. The infinity pool is the opposite, deeper and more pleasant, but the view from it is far less attractive, and delivery vehicles sometimes make themselves heard and smelled from there.
Shade in the pools, by which I mean shade while you are actually in the water. There is almost none: a little at the Privilege pool very early in the morning, none at all at the infinity pool, one small patch behind some trees at the main pool. Even the children's pool is fully exposed. On the terraces it is not much better. When you are on your lounger, you can use one of the many parasols available, but they do not tilt, so however you position one, there are times when you simply cannot get your lounger fully into the shade. Even with two parasols, it was sometimes difficult to get enough shade.
The loungers themselves are average, with nothing to cover them but your own towel. Only the Privilege section has mattresses, and even there, the loungers feel basic next to what you find at some other hotels (e.g. the Jardines de Nivaria in Tenerife, where every guest is given a fitted towelling cover that runs the full length of the mattress, and the parasols tilt and work very well).
The minibar. As in most hotels, this is not a proper fridge but an absorption cooler, silent and gentle by design rather than powerful, which is fine and usually works well. This one, though, was unusually ineffective, and drinks never got properly cold. I never raised it at the desk, and I imagine it could have been turned down had I asked.
A few smaller things. Room service stops at 10pm, which is a shame in a five-star hotel. And the underground car park must be very small, because I was unable to get a space there for the whole of my stay, though there is street parking nearby.
— WHAT IS BAFFLING
The orange juice at breakfast. It comes from what is known as a post-mix dispenser, the Nektar Natura machine called The Stand (see attached photo). Concentrate is stored in the cabinet underneath and mixed with chilled water as it is served. The machine, without a trace of irony, invites you to "Taste the freshness".
Several different products go by the name of orange juice: freshly squeezed, cold-pressed, pasteurised direct juice, pasteurised juice from concentrate, and reconstituted post-mix. They are not equally good, and they do not cost the same. H10 has picked the cheapest of them, which is to say it has chosen to behave like a budget hotel. Without going as far as freshly squeezed, the hotel could at least move up a rung and pour what many four-star and even three-star hotels manage to pour. The hotel does serve freshly squeezed juice at the à la carte breakfast reserved for Privilege guests, so it knows perfectly well that this matters. Do post-mix juice and Horizons Collection, a brand H10 presents as premium, really go together?
Many people probably think that the post-mix juice tastes fine, but nobody really believes that freshly squeezed juice belongs in one-star hotels and post-mix in five-star ones. The post-mix machine belongs in the kind of hotel that Horizons Collection claims not to be.
The bars. At the Tropical Chill-out it seems hard to be served in under thirty minutes, even when the bar is two thirds empty. The cocktails are to cocktails what the post-mix machine is to orange juice: syrup, water and a little alcohol, garnished with a slice of dried fruit. My piña colada was not creamy, had no character and was half ice (see attached photo). The mojito was no more convincing. The lobby bar was no better: one drink in an hour, and a frozen daiquiri I would rather forget. No nuts or crisps arrive with a drink either; I gather from a management reply to another review that guests are expected to ask. I have never been to hotel school, but I am fairly certain that "wait until the guest asks" is not quite what they mean by anticipating needs.
The name of the Naturalia restaurant. Follow the hotel map to the exact spot marked Naturalia and you find yourself between two venues: a restaurant whose sign says La Brasserie, and the Naturalia bar. Which one do you want if you are looking for the Naturalia restaurant? As surprising as it may seem, it is La Brasserie.
At lunchtime, and only at lunchtime, La Brasserie goes by a second name, Naturalia. That name appears nowhere on site. You can check this yourself on the interactive map on the hotel's website, which states that Naturalia is "converted into" La Brasserie for dinner. Conceptually converted, that is, since no sign ever changes. The other Naturalia is the bar.
Presumably it works this way because Naturalia is a lunch restaurant open to all guests, while La Brasserie is a dinner restaurant with a different menu, reserved for Privilege guests. Hence two names for one room. Giving the bar a different name would have been so much simpler. Is the plan that guests get confused, ask a member of staff, and are told that to eat at Naturalia they have to go to La Brasserie, which is next to Naturalia?
Because of all this I never ate at Naturalia once. I took it for the bar, it did not appeal to me, and I went to the buffet instead. I only worked out what had happened when I sat down to write this review.
— VERDICT
The juice, the bars and the restaurant names are not bad luck on the day. They are decisions taken somewhere in an office by people who, it seems, never sat down at the buffet, never waited half an hour for a drink at the bar, and never tried to find a restaurant from the map.
I was tempted to give three stars because of those issues, but I have to admit that my stay, taken as a whole, was a good one, and that is what my four-star rating reflects. The setting, the rooms, the housekeeping, the restaurants and a number of staff who clearly care make this a genuinely good hotel overall. But H10, please: get rid of that post-mix machine, and put the right name above the restaurant door.
Would I come back? If I were returning to Gran Canaria, yes, probably. If I could pick any of the Canary Islands, I would rather go back to the Jardines de Nivaria in Tenerife.
Note: this is a reorganised version of a review I published earlier. A management reply made me realise that some of my points were not clear enough. My opinion has not changed, and neither has the rating."
