Melia Salinas

I cannot recommend this hotel the rooms on the bottom floor are small and the balcony are terrible and dirty the food is absolutely rubbish if you want something like lamb in one of the restaurants got changed 25 uros. People trying to sell you a sort of time sher.in hotels all the time. The entertainment is on for about 2 hours a night. And most of the singers are rubbish. All you see all night is People playing cards because of the boredom. The beach is terrible and you have to pay for sunbeds 17 uros each. Was really glad to get away from the hotel and the resort. The best thing about the hotel is the pool. And when we got there I asked if we had a sea view and got told we would have to pay £550 extra. We refused and told them no chance. Part of the hotel you are not allowed it's for the reserved one sep up from 5 star. It really makes you feel like second class.

We’ve just come back from a 7 night stay, and the hotel does have some lovely aspects to it, but also lots of improvements to be made in order to be a true 5* hotel.

Firstly, the hotel itself is beautiful, the rooms clean and modern, and we had the best nights sleep in the very large and comfortable bed! The location is excellent, right on the beachfront, and a 5 minute walk to the main square, where there are a variety of restaurants and bars should you like a change of scenery.

However there are a few things that did not leave a good first impression on us, although it did improve as the week went on.

On arrival; we were greeted with a refreshing beverage which was a nice touch, and on departure was given a little gift of soaps and scrubs which again was a nice touch.

We were taken to our room which was lovely and modern, clean, big enough and had a lovely large and comfortable bed that gave us the best nights sleep we’ve ever had! However when we went out onto the balcony on our first day, after about an hour someone came and started cutting the tree down outside the balcony causing debris to fall all over us and cover the balcony. As we looked up to see where it was coming from the man working on the tree gestured at us to go inside. We felt we could have had some warning about this. I went down to reception to request that they clean the balcony once the work had been finished. She was very nice and assured me it would be cleaned. However after about 4 hours we noticed it had not been cleaned and the work appeared to have stopped. I asked again for it to be cleaned and was assured it would be. The next day, it still had not been cleaned. And to be clear, the balcony at this stage was unusable. The whole thing, including the table and chairs were covered in dust, branches and bird poo. I went down a third time and said I was frustrated that in 24 hours it still had not been cleaned despite two requests. I was informed that they may need to move our room as the work might last all week, but there would not be a room available until the following day. We would then be entering into day 3/4 of the holiday which is half of it not being able to use the balcony. I requested if we did need to be moved that we would be given a room not on the ground floor for the inconvenience and was told this would not be possible as that is reserved for guests who pay a higher premium. Whilst I was there I told her I also wanted to raise another couple of issues we had. I raised that we were unable to book into all of the restaurants. She said she would look into this for me and book us into the others however I did not hear back from her about this and as a result, we did not get to experience the other restaurants, except the Italian which we had managed to get a very early reservation for. Instead we went to the square a couple of times and paid out to eat and were not disappointed- there were tonnes of excellent restaurants there to choose from.

I also raised the issue of the smoking and vaping area. I said it was fine in the day time but of an evening people were sitting on the floor, and could they provide some more seating around that area as we did not feel welcomed. She said she would look into this but again nothing was done. She also said we could use our balcony for this…however at this stage we still did not have a usable one.

That evening we had a terrible experience at the ginger bar. They have a terrible system of table service and repeatedly lost our orders which meant we never recieved our drinks. When I raised this with presumably the manager of the ginger bar (as he was in a white shirt whilst no one else was) he was very rude and abrupt. There was no apology, and unfortunately the abrupt attitude or the staff continued throughout the holiday. We only ever had smiles from the reception team, the serving team were unfortunately consistently rude throughout our stay, with the exception of Hamza at the pool bar.

I decided to write via the WhatsApp service they provided about the issues we had, as at this stage, we were half way through our holiday and had no usable balcony, horrible experiences at the bar and nowhere to smoke as we could not use our balcony for this due to it being out of action; and there wasn’t adequate seating in the one, small smoking area they had. I put all of this in writing and did not receive a response until 24 hours later. My partner said whilst he was in the room earlier someone had come up and checked the balcony had been cleaned. I then received a response via WhatsApp saying that they basically understood everything had been resolved to our satisfaction and if there’s anything else to let them know. At this point; it was Thursday afternoon, we only had a short time left and I could not spend any more of it complaining to get the level of service I had paid for so I ignored the message. Unfortunately their incredibly slow service meant that issues raised were not dealt with in a timely manner, and was taking too much of my holiday, and quite frankly wasn’t good enough.

In addition, the divide of the reserve areas and the rest of the hotel is slightly odd- we had already paid thousands to book in with this hotel and in order to get a better service we would need to pay substantially more. A 5* resort should not have a “them and us” situation where is appears you can only get a good level of service if you pay even more. It felt quite money grabby to us and not reflective of a 5* experience.

The current process they have for booking the à la carte restaurants and day time activities, and the evening service for drinks needs reviewing and quickly. I can see from prior reviews this has been an ongoing complaint for a long time and nothing has been done to address it as we saw the same problems.

I would say though that the La Graciosa restaurant for lunch was excellent, as was the food at the shack bar. The quality of the drinks and cocktails were also fantastic, although the service continued to be very slow in the evenings. My partner used the gym which he said was very nice as well. The breakfast buffet and evening buffet was adequate, however probably not 5* standard.

Overall it’s a beautiful hotel, with high quality lunch time food and beverages, and the rooms were lovely and comfortable. They refreshed the mini bar regularly and the towels and the location was brilliant. We had a genuinely lovely stay but it could have been improved had the staff been more reactive when things were raised. The service for us brings this down and as such, we are unlikely to return. We were inconvenienced from day 1, and had to repeatedly request for the bare minimum when they should have been bending over backwards to rectify the situation in a timely manner.

My wife and I came here for a 10 night holiday and from the moment we arrived we were treated like royalty everyone from the reception to the cleaning staff were so friendly a special thanks to Marcos in the reserve bar for his outstanding service not to mention the fantastic cocktails and to David in the main bar all we had to do was look in his direction and he would be over serving This Hotel lives up to the 5 star rating we had a fantastic time and will definitely return