"Before I begin writting this review, I would just like to take the opportunity to say that Alucida is beautiful and without the experience of this hotel, I believe would have had a much better holiday.
I would first like to note that people should stay away from the Facebook groups which are Fan Pages for this hotel, they are militant, agrressive and seem to have either very low standards (should you post any sort of critique there) or are paid to big the hotel up.
The reason for our scoring was largely down to the hotel itself and the clientele that go there. Their website shouts about this being a fun, family resort for people to go to and the picutures falsely over glamourise the resort.
Season:
PLEASE, whatever you do, If you do decide to stay here, do not make the same mistake we did when we booked this holiday, we were unaware that the week we went was the last week of the season and were not told this until it was noted by someone on the official facebook group.
I can tell you now we have never felt so unwelcome in a hotel, EVER. We arrived on the Friday and by the Monday they had stopped all daytime activies and had begun closing areas of the resort down.
By mid-week they had restricted the food and also the dinning areas were greatley reduced, to the point one day there were queues for up to 45 minutes just to get into the dinning area.
The bars were all closed, the drink fountains had not been refilled with the flavourings.
On our last few days they had removed lots of the sun loungers and were stacking them up and power washing them.
The hotel has a distinct lack of anything to do if you do not want to go into the pools. One of the days we had torrential rain. The entertainment was shocking, everyone was squashed into a small seated area in the base of Saturn and Jupiter - Sitting around bored. They had one singer come on, who was meh at best and then some card tricks at the tables. There is a very small arcade at the bottom each hotel and quite frankly that was the only thing people were going on, they must be raking in the money with people pushing 1 euro into these machines every few minutes.
The mosquitoes at this time of the year are almost unbearable. We spent hundreds of pounds bringing expensive repelants, wrist bands, lotions, lemon hair wash, room-plugins and nothing and I mean NOTHING stopped us getting bit. The resort is situation on a boggy marshland and has a giant stagnant lake, which is a gigantic breeding ground for mosquitoes, myself and my partner came away with 50+ bites.
Check-In:
Myself, my partner and my two year old arrived to an extremely overcroweded main entrace and a long queue at the check-in desk (we had been travelling roughly 6 hours to get here, only to then wait for nearly an hour while someone argued over their 1 Euro cups.. I will come back to these cups later on in the review).
We were given our wristbands and told to head to our room (there are 3 giant hotels in this resort) and were simply pointed in a direction by the check-in team, which we then had to navigate to our hotel (Jupiter).
We were subsequently placed on the top floor and it took us roughly 15 minutes just for us to get an elevator up to the floor. This also became an issue where I believe we spent literally hours waiting for the elevators to come up (people letting their unruley children run in them and press all the buttons once they left the elevator).
Room:
The room itself was a twin double and as mentioned previously the images overglamourise the hotel room itself, taken with a figheye lens to make it seem bigger, with our suitcases, hand luggage and pushchair for our little one packed into the room, we simply had no space, we had one foot end of the bed and the space between our beds to navigate around the entire roome.
Facilities:
The hotel "boasts" 7 pools - all of which are unheated and quite fankly are unbearable when the weather is in the low 20's.
Our two year old could not stay in the main pools for longer than a few minutes, he was going blue with the cold. This greatly affected our holiday as we were hoping be by the pool with him most day, this never happened.
There is splash pool that we went to twice however this is even colder than the main pools and again we couldn't stay there for very long.
The hotel states that it has softplay facilities, which we were excited about as it would be something for our 2 year old to do instead of the pools, this was EXTREMELY overstated, the softplay is situated in what I can only describe as an emptied out office room, with foam mats and a handful of cushion softplay blocks. This is situated in the first floor of Saturn in a redundant office space (chairs thrown around, old signage and stage equipment lobbed around). The size of the room could only house maybe 10 children at a push, and on the day it was raining, it was completely full so much so the kids were running around throwing chairs and other items in the rest of the office space. Extremely unsual.
Food:
Breakfast was fine, however on multiple occasions we witnessed other clientele arguing with the staff over pancakes, bacon etc.
Lunch menu in the main dinning spaces was overally quite an unusual offering with largely continental items like cold meats etc on offer. As much as we didn't want to we ended up spending most of our lunches at either the burger or pizza places around the lake.
Dinners was generally okay with the typical beige offerings that a 3-Star hotel normally provides - With event nights which were okay, except the Chinese night, were there was literally a half an hour queue to get to the stations - I had one plate of food and left.
Drinks:
The drinks situation is the most unusual I have ever come across in an all inclusive, you have to pay the hotel 1 euro to "rent" a small plastic cup off of them. You subsequently have to carry said cup around with you everywhere you go. They serve San Miguel from the beer pumps which honestly I cannot fault, they are always gassed and ice cold. However the cocktails are serves from either Slushy machines or programmed drinks dispensers, and are extremely inconsistent and watered down.
Soft Drinks for Children were also served in the same manner, where usually in other hotels they would be self serve. I noted that some children were sometimes waiting 15-20 minutes to get one very small (150ml) cup of soft drink. There was no diluted juices i.e. squash, these were actual fruit juices from concentrate, which a 2 year old cannot drink the entire time we were there.
Clientele:
This was one the biggest issues why we would not return to this hotel ever again - It was mentioned in other posts that its like Butlins in Spain, I have to disagree, I feel that Butlins is superior. The people that go to this resort simply want to go there to get their fill of beer and alcohol while their children tend to themselves, and when I say tend to themselves I mean, run around, jump off tables, kick footballs into crowed, scream/shout, play in the toilets, vomit, deficate and urinate everywhere around the toilets.
In the evening we would go to bed and have kids kicking footballs down our corridor untill 12-1AM at night. People leaving their TV's on full blast while they go out, one evening one of the TV's in the room next to us was on full volume and was playing the same thing over and over for hours and hours. Keeping us awake.
Staff:
I would mention that the cleaning staff, when we actually saw them, were extremely pleasant and kind, however I cannot say the same about any of the other staff around the hotel.
The bar staff were extremely miserable, I would always greet them in spanish and try to be as polite as possible, but 9 times out of 10 they would scowl at you as if they couldn't care less or would say "WHAT DO YOU WANT" and then proceed to slop you drink down on the bar.
The caterin staff in the main halls were also extremely rude to us (other than some that were clearing plates). An older lady shouted at us twice because our pushchair got in her way (there was little room to put the pushchair).
The buggy park where we were told to put this was outside of the restaurant an not in line of sight, we had already heard that people had had pushchairs and items stolen from them, so we refused to leave it unattended.
One specific "chef", another older lady names Mar, was also rude to us on multple occassions, shouting at us for requesting honey for our pancakes (which was available every other day we were there) and for asking when the bacon would be ready.
Overall we were extremeley disappointed with the whole experience at Club Mac and would not recommend staying here again."
