I posted my initial review under pressure of one of the animation team, whilst we were sat in the reception bar one evening, which I felt was highly unprofessional. In my original review I had scored the rooms 3 stars and service and location 4. The employee wanted to see the review before HE posted it, off MY phone! He questioned my rating and I explained that the room we had was slightly outdated and not overly clean, he was promising us he could get our room changed, with 2 nights left I told him it was pointless. He wasn’t happy for me to post the original review and practically begged me to change it to 5 stars. There were 4 other people from our group also sat with me at this time and he also asked them to do the same. One of them also gave the room 3 stars and made the same comments as I did regarding the rooms, to which she received exactly the same reaction from him. In the end we changed it to 5 stars so that he could take a photo of it and what’s app it to his presumably boss (!) for the sake of him going away and leaving us alone. It very much seemed that the animation team were sent out to collect these “5 star” reviews from guests and screenshot them to send to their boss, for whatever reason! I understand it is part of staff duty to ensure guests are happy with their stay, however pressuring them into giving 5* reviews is unbelievably unprofessional and made us so uncomfortable.
With regards to the actual hotel, the grounds are lovely, immaculate, and very well kept.
As I’ve originally said, the rooms we had really need updating, they were quite dull and parts of it looked grubby, such as the curtains, grout in shower, shelves and surfaces were covered in sand and dust. I do understand that rooms are updated in rotation, however it doesn’t seem fair that one guest could have a lovely new room, whilst others are left with dull and drab rooms.
The staff in general were delightful and couldn’t do enough to help, particularly Daniel at the pool bar and Saber at the reception bar. We did have a feeling the staff in general were quite overworked, in the 10 days we were there, most of the staff had been there every day, morning to night, and some said they got as little as 2 hours sleep per night. We were approached by guest services one day by the pool, and we had told them how lovely one of the lifeguards had been during our stay, his face lit up as if he had never been praised or complemented before, it did seem like some staff praise and recognition for their constant hard work would be very appreciated by them.