Enorme Santanna Island

The hotel appears to be split into 2 sections. Top Hotel appears older with swim up pools and smaller rooms. The sunbeds are dirty and stained and the snack bar is situated here. The bottom hotel ( which is what is advertised on the website ) hosts the main swimming pool, aperol bar, coffee house and main restaurant. The rooms appear larger and you are experiencing what you see on the website. Our experience has been mixed - Accommodation - the room is large and very clean. The balcony is shared which is the only negative. Small issues within the room were resolved quickly with no issues. Food - the food in the buffet is of average quality. There is plenty of variety and offerings but the quality is poor. Staffing - the customer facing staff were all pleasant. The receptionist interactions were pleasant and helpful. The bar staff were accommodating and the housekeeping worked hard. However, the management team require customer service training. The ability to apologise when a customer is unhappy and attempt to resolve would go a long way. Unfortunately Joanna did not display this. Facilities - The pools were large, clean and refreshing. The sunbeds are 2 piece beds and need attaching to the base to stay on. However they require constant adjusting to change position. The main pool is relaxing with a sea view and the hotel complex is clean and has a calm feel about it. Negatives - There is an attending DJ for 3 hours every mon and Fri who plays techno music round the pool. There was no quicker way to clear the pool. This ruins the afternoon and brings nothing to the quite relaxing serene atmosphere. The music is louder than necessary and no amount of asking for it to be turned down worked. The inconsistencies around the bar, depending on staffing depended on which bar was serving cocktails.

After 9 nights our first family holiday has left us frustrated and disappointed. We knew that the hotel was in its early days, however the issues we faced will persist long into the hotels running unless they are addressed; poor room layout, discrepancies in advertising and confrontational & unhelpful management. Advertisement V what we experienced. Rooms: privacy is hard to come by at this hotel, there is not a single room that isn’t overlooked by either the main pools, the main courtyard, or a public road & foot path. A simple fix for a lot of rooms would be a small privacy fence. However, rooms are generally clean and fresh as you’d expect with a ‘new’ hotel. The private pool rooms and swim up rooms are not only overlooked by the public and other guests, they don’t get sun until late morning/ early afternoon, and if you opt for a bed at one of the 4 pools, set your alarm for 7 AM, as they are all gone by 8. Restaurants & bars: one restaurant (Asian fusion) was still being built despite the hotel’s website advertising it as open, even including opening hours. Likewise for the Roasta coffee house & Apperol gazebo spot. The buffet restaurant is not open 24 hours contrary again to what the hotels website states. In general the opening hours for the majority of restaurants/ bars is incorrect on the website. Room service is not included in Premium all inclusive, and as others have remarked, you can only visit each a la cart restaurant once per stay. Evening entertainment occurred on 1 night out of 9. The main buffet restaurant focuses on churning out as much food as possible during dinner service, which is great if you lack taste buds. The desserts however were brilliant every lunch and dinner serving. Staff & service: Customer facing staff were generally pleasant and helpful. It was evident throughout our 9 night stay that they are extremely strained on staffing numbers. On several different occasions staff told us that they “do not have days off”, and are “waiting for new staff” before they can get a break. The low staffing numbers led to some horrendous wait times for drinks & food. Reception staff- while friendly- were not overly helpful. In a decent hotel with a similar price tag you would expect that ‘no ask is too much’. With Santanna Island their approach seems to be; “come back later”, “ask someone else”, or “it’s not our problem”. When we raised issues on discrepancies between what was advertised V what we had experienced the front of house management were less than helpful, implying that the company we booked through were at fault and that we as a family should’ve done more research, yet also admitting that they should, and will, update their own website to reflect the true experience guests should expect. Only one of these can be true. The overall demeanour of management at this hotel is very poor, we did not feel like they had our best interests at heart and conversations felt defensive to a confrontational extent on their part.

Not entirely happy with our stay here. Firstly I think a map is needed to give guests as I found navigating the restaurants and bars confusing and staff didn’t help massively, the hotel is massively understaffed however most of them are friendly. The times on the sheet given to us were different to the times online and what staff had told us so we didn’t know what was actually correct and had to find out for ourselves. An issue we encountered was that early continental breakfast both online and on the sheet given to us says it opens at 5am and when we went down at about half past 5 there was nothing set up and no one there, having gone to the reception desk to ask we were given no apology and told that it wasn’t happening and he didn’t know why and that we’d just have to wait for the buffet at half past 7. I don’t believe it would be open from 22:00- 04:00 either if that’s the case. All inclusive ‘premium’ feels pretty useless when they can’t even get the times correct. The food was decent, some nights better than others but that’s to be expected, however I think maybe having a machine for fizzy drinks could make it easier as having to order and wait for the staff to come around is time consuming and if it’s busy it takes a while. I will say that the bar for drinks and food was good, the two men that worked there during the day were very nice and hard working especially the bartender, and the food was good but be prepared to wait in a queue for drinks and be waiting at least a half hour for food to be ready. A lot of places didn’t seem to be open like the Nutella crepe pop up, we never saw this once and the aperol hut, every time we walked past it wasn’t open. We also never saw the Asian restaurant or the coffee place. The pool areas are nice but the pool is absolutely freezing all day long despite the sun being on it, I’d say some sort of heater is definitely necessary as every single person was struggling to get into that pool due to how cold it was despite the sun being out. The rooms were nice, small but modern however the showers rainfall head did not work, the weighing scales didn’t turn on and the space where the toilet was placed is extremely small and anyone overweight would definitely have trouble getting to it and the toilet paper is about the thinnest it can be. The reading light next to the bed didn’t work and the fridge in the bedroom is a nice feature but it’s very loud so if you like to sleep in silence it’s not very good. The website also states that you will get robes and slippers in the room which we did not get. I would also like to mention that I’m glad I did not book to have a private pool or swim up room as they have absolutely no privacy and can be looked into by everyone and some were even on the road all the cars go on and where people walk past. On our second to last day we also got locked out of our room, the key stopped working on the door and we had to go down to reception twice to try and get it sorted. They did not