Top Hotel Gran Casino Royal, Lloret de Mar

Author's product rating:   

Value for Money	Poor
Quality of Rooms	Terrible
Cleanliness	Terrible
Quality of Facilities	Poor
Family Friendly	Terrible

Advantages:	Friendly staff, and nice beach not far away .  Great location for party animals .
Disadvantages:	Noisy hotel all day and night .  Not family friendly .  Lack of sleep due to noise .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

This hotel should be avoided by anyone wishing to sleep for the duration of their stay!!! In fact, it should just be avoided by everyone!!!

The only 'guests' (or inmates) who will enjoy this place are those who are out until 07:30 cruising the many nightclubs, and who are last back in the hotel after the others of their ilk have already passed out from too much drink and narcotics…

We were relocated by Sun4U without notice , and our firm booking for the Planamar hotel in Malgrat de Mar (for which we had paid £1800) was magically changed to Allocation On Arrival at the Casino Royal (by pen on the ResortHoppa transfer sheet on our arrival at the airport) as apparently the Planamar suddenly didn't have room to put us up.

We are aged 53 & 50 and were travelling with our 2 grandchildren, aged 8 and 7.

When we arrived in Lloret de Mar at 05:00, we were dumped on a street corner near to the hotel, and had to make our way with 4 cases and 2 children through crowds of drunken youths, and up some crowded stairs into the hotel reception.

When we got inside, and finally managed to get the receptionist (probably the rudest member of staff in the area, not just this hotel) to drag himself away from giving out a girl's room number to a drunken Dutch boy, and then phoning her room on his behalf, he told us we weren't booked in here, and that we would have to get a taxi back to the Planamar, (which we had recently driven past) as that was the hotel on our accommodation voucher. I now wish that I had done as he suggested, and got the Planamar to put us up, as that was just the start of quite a lot of hassle, and upset.

Eventually he looked through a pile of paperwork, where he found our names, and an allocated room on the 2nd floor. When at last we managed to get our cases in the lift, after a few groups of youths who were blocking the reception area were moved on by the need for sleep, it was 05:30 and the children were falling asleep on their feet.

To say it was bedlam was an understatement, as there was still a lot of movement, bad language, shouting, banging and throwing of objects in the corridors, and missiles landing in the streets outside.

When we opened the door to Room 256, I turned round to my wife, and had to apologise for what I had let us in for… The room was about 9 feet x 12 feet, with 4 grotty different-sized beds jammed into the corner, and not enough room to walk around them. The floor was filthy, and sticky, and the room smelt dreadful. We couldn't get the bathroom door to close, and the walls were full of holes. There was only one small wardrobe, insufficient space on the floor to open a suitcase, and the balcony window wouldn't close properly.

I went back down to reception to ask for another room, and was told I was lucky they had that room, as it was all they had, and that I would have to wait until 10:00, and try to sort it out with the day staff.

Having now been up for best part of 24 hours, I went back to the room, tried and failed to grab a few hours sleep, and headed back to reception at 09:30. When I asked for our passports to be returned, as we were going to another hotel, and would send them the bill, the receptionist 'found' a key for another room, where the guests apparently hadn't turned up the previous day (lucky people), and was offered the chance to take a look… Room 319, at the casino end of the hotel, was like a different world.

I don't normally complain, but if the change in standards is what you get by complaining, then I'm going to do it every time…

When I walked in, I couldn't believe my eyes. 2 double beds, 2 singles, and still more empty floor space than the total area of the other hole we'd previously been allocated.

I used the phone in the room, to phone my wife, and told her to meet me in the corridor, and we walked our cases up to 319 straight away.

Then we just had the rest of the week to get through… This hotel was probably very grand about 30 years ago, it's now getting a bit 'dated', with broken sunbeds, cracked concrete around the pool, midnight lock-in, and other petty AI rules. This hotel is not child-friendly, or disabled accessible, and the lift system needs a bit of work. Anyone who didn't get a free trip to the 6th floor at least once during their stay must have been using the stairs.

The bar staff did a wonderful job considering the average attitude of the clientele, whose main task for the evening was stocking up their soft drinks bottles with alcohol for their excursions outside the hotel.

The extremely bad manners of certain guests, and the lack of respect shown towards those who are paid a pittance to serve them, made for an unhappy group of staff who were normally polite and friendly in return. Staff were friendly, and really appreciated it if you made the effort to speak Spanish, and although most people just asked for their drinks in their native tongue, without even a please or thankyou, so that anyone who spoke Spanish got just a bit of better service.

The maids had a job on their hands cleaning up after the animals, and it shows in their work. Dirty towels were often replaced, albeit with dry towels, but it didn't look as though they had been laundered, and we never had our sheets changed all week, even when I took them all off, and bundled them on one bed.

No air conditioning in the rooms, and the constant noise requiring balcony doors to be closed at night, made for very uncomfortable sleeping areas.

This is one hotel and one Spanish town that I'll never revisit, and hope never to have to use Sun4U again as their customer service stops the moment they have your money.