My family and I have just returned from Lanzarote where we stayed at the Lanzarote Bay hotel. We traveled with MyTravel, the conglomerate that includes Airtours, direct holidays Panorama and the travel agent Going Places.

The hotel is in Costa Tequise which is about a 20 minute drive from the airport.
We arrived at our hotel at 10:40pm, half an hour after we should have because of a baggage handling delay.
No one was available to help us to our room and we were on the third floor. The hotel did not have a lift. We had a pushchair with our two year old sleepily ensconced inside; our 5 year old, two large suitcases, and two small kids pull along suitcases. If it were not for a guest that helped us up the steps, we would have had to make 2 or 3 trips up the 39 steps to our room.

The brochure states that the hotel is over a kilometer away from the beach, which it runs a courtesy bus to, we did however find a small beautiful beach less than 10 minutes walk way. There are also a few shops, restaurants, and a bank in the same area, basically just around the back of the hotel. We found the mini market (netto) to be a lot cheaper than the hotel shop and found it hilarious to see some of the snobbier guests around the resort swinging Netto bags in their hands! (for those of you that don’t have Netto in your area it is a cheap, cut-price supermarket)

The hotel runs on an all-inclusive basis, however many of the facilities at the hotel do need to be paid for locally. All these amounts soon add up to the cost of the holiday.
An example of one of these costs that reduced our spending money was the TV in the room. It cost €1 per hour (around 65p) it may not sound a lot but with 2 small children who we wanted to keep out of the heat in the afternoon it soon added up over the length of the holiday. The safe was also €20 per week tp hire + a €5 per week deposit.

On the food side it was plentiful if a little strange sometimes (we had sprouts on the poolside snack bar one day!) The food did tend to be ‘recycled’ though, if we had roast beef one day (freshly carved and beautiful) the leftovers were served sliced in gravy the next lunchtime, and leftover veg were similarly served up the next day in a béchamel or cheese sauce. The hotel had a couple of theme nights that were very nice – a themed cocktail as you went into the restaurant and a vast array of dishes. Whilst we were there, we had a Mexican night (yum) a Canarian night (way too salty) an Italian night (carb overload!) and my fave the Chinese night were we could have a quarter of a freshly cooked duck. After a week we did get a little fed up of the meals so had a couple of meals out and takeaway pizza once. We had out meals at the newly opened Fat Larry’s Diner, which was very nice and had very reasonably priced food.