I became motivated to write this after receiving the survey at the end of my stay here. I didn’t have very many good things to say. So I referred them to my blog for more details.

Kara and I have stayed at some good resorts, including a few very good ones. So we know what a really good resort should offer. The sad thing is that now that we have kids our standards are much lower. All we are really looking for is a comfortable, self-catered room that can we can all sleep in comfortably, good food and beach/pool access. Really, that’s about it. This resort failed on most of those criteria.

We booked a double bedroom and were checked into Montana-01. The room comes with a living room/dining room combination, small galley kitchen with a hob (range), microwave and dishwasher and two ensuite bedrooms. There was also a small walled off patio that was really only good for drying towels in as it contained nothing but a single plastic lawn chair and a clothes line. The walls were about 2 ¼ metres high, so it was really a box without a roof. There was also a sofa with a pull-out bed and a swing-down bed. Upon arrival we requested a cot. I was told at the time that it would be delivered as soon as the porter finished bringing some bags to rooms, but in fact we had to go and check on it several hours later and it finally arrived some time after that.

There were a number of problems with the room, but they were relatively minor overall. The kitchen had a dishwasher but they did not provide either dishwasher detergent or regular disk-soap. We ended up hand-washing all the dishes because we couldn’t get to the on-site grocery store when it was open and the local supermarkets did not stock it. And the rest is probably more typical. There weren’t many cooking implements – no spatulas, for example, dull knives and so forth. The point of getting a self-catered room is to, well, cook. We didn’t do much cooking. And of course the beds were uncomfortable and the pillows flat, but I didn’t hold out hope for much better, to be honest. We have a nice bed at home so I expect to have less comfortable bed on a trip. It still sucks, but beds are a very individual thing and I can’t complain too much about that.

There was no way to make coffee in the room other than a filter funnel. Although the resort touts ‘room service’, there was none. Room service had been discontinued and it was take-away. Oddly enough, they did not actually have take-away coffee cups. So we could get a cup of coffee at the Mai-Tai restaurant (where they serve breakfast), but if we got it take-away they put it in a red disposable Coca-Cola cup. On one occasion, they couldn’t find a plastic top for the cup that fit.

The housekeeping was not good as well. We have two kids, 4 and 1. They, well, they make a mess. In one stretch, the glass coffee table, which had kid-goo smudge marks all over it was not cleaned for three days. And there was no housekeeping at all on Sunday – we had to call and ask for a quick cleanup – wipe down, trash and towels. They came promptly and did trash and towels but no cleaning. But that was OK, we could overlook that on a Sunday in a different country and culture.

On the other hand, I could not get the phone to work. Since we really didn’t need it much (only to place take-out orders and receive the pick-up call) it didn’t bother us too much until we had a phone experience that seems typical of the service here. My wife had managed to get the phone to work just by repeated attempts. I found that something like one in three tries would work. On our last night, we ordered take-out from the Hacienda restaurant. The kids were starving having just come back from the beach and it seemed to be taking them a long time to call back. My wife went down to the Hacienda to check up on the food. They explained that they had tried to call us but it seemed that the phone didn’t work. So they placed a maintenance call to have the phone fixed and left our food sitting there. If we hadn’t checked up on it, I don’t know if we ever would have gotten it.

The phone guy gets there a bit later. He speaks only Spanish. He asks Kara what the problem is, in Spanish, and it immediately becomes clear that he will not be able to do anything without a translator. So he calls the front desk and Kara explains the problem to them. Then the front desk explains it to him. He seems to think it’s a line problem and he can’t fix it, so he leaves. By the way, he left his work order list in our room leaving me to thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t in Plaza del Sol-39, where the ‘cisterna no para.’

The same thing happened with the wifi internet in the lobby. They have two wifi zones – one in the lobby and one in the Mai-Tai restaurant down by the beach. I used the wifi in the lobby bar the first time I blogged. Two nights later I went to blog and I got a connected to the zone, but the Telefonica website where you type in your PIN to gain access was not available. I reported this to the front desk immediately. The guy, who was very nice, asked me what the problem was and I explained it. He looked very sympathetic but made no attempt to report or log the problem. As I was leaving he mentioned that there was wifi in the Mai-Tai and that some people could pick up the signal from the beach across the lagoon. And why do you have to sit on the beach near the lagoon? Because they close the Mai-Tai at 6PM. And so I sat in a reclining lounge chair and blogged whilst the tide came in. It wasn’t very comfortable. I checked the lobby wifi two days after that and it was still broken. Which is not surprising because Telefonica still probably has no idea it’s down.

There were a few other problems – one that was significant and deserves further notice. All of the walkways are paved with a very smooth red tile. The kind of tile that turns into a sheet of ice when it becomes wet. The pools in the plazas all had fake grass around them as a buffer zone, but the pool at the Mai-Tai did not. I cannot tell you how many times Katherine and Alex slipped on this tile. I took Katherine there our last day and she fell three times. Thank heaven they didn’t fall bad enough to hit their heads because it could have caused a serious injury. I mean, come on, they make tiles for pools that are non slip. This is a major safety hazard – one significant enough that I would never recommend that a family with small kids come here.

Also, apparently by law you are not allowed to have a heated pool here. The pools were very cold – too cold to swim in for any length of time. The pool at the Mai-Tai was heated, but only barely – it was still really cold. I should explain that the Mai-Tai is on a little island in the middle of a lagoon that is tidal, so I guess it’s technically exempt from this law, but if so I wonder why it wasn’t warmer. I couldn’t stay in that pool for more than 15 minutes or so, and neither could Katherine who is usually more tolerant of cold water than I.

And let’s talk about that lagoon for a second. It’s clearly a centerpiece of the resort. You can book rooms that are right on the sandy beach of the lagoon. It looks like the perfect setup for a family. We didn’t stay there on the advice of a co-worker and it was a good thing. The lagoon was disgusting. It may be tidal, but it looked to me like that meant that the top third of the tide came over a breakwater. There was a lot of algae and other growth in it, as well as rocks along the bottom. Kara took Alex there one day and told me that it was very unpleasant.

But at least there is the food, right? Resort food is usually pretty good. *sigh*. Do you really want to know about the dry-as-a-bone chicken, the hamburger with chips of bone in it, or the salad with about two onions worth of rings thrown on top of it? The English breakfast was OK as was the Margerita pizza, but Kara and I soon tired of those.

One thing I will say is that the location is pretty good. It’s on the north side of Costa Teguise and you can take a sea-walk down to all the local beaches. But only during daytime – at night they lock all the beach access gates. This, in itself, is pretty ridiculous. Unless they are hidden (in which case they are a terrible deterrent), there were no CCTVs watching the sea-walk and it’s trivial to hop over any number of areas on the wall to get into the resort. I know, because I did it one night. I wanted to take a walk out onto the breakwater and watch the waves. The front desk told me that I had to walk along the road inland up and around (about a kilometer) to get there. I jumped over the back wall to save myself the walk. I mean, what beach resort doesn’t let you get to the beach? Never mind the fact that the guest parking lot gates were open to the street every time I came in and out with the car – as late at 10:30pm and the service road for these has unrestricted access to all the rooms.

Oh I could go on, but I’ll stop there save this: the entertainment looked really bad. Whilst blogging in the Sunset Bar (in the lobby), I endured bingo, Karaoke, and later saw two guys playing blues on electric guitars with all the other instrumentation pre-recorded. I heard a cabaret act at the coin-op Internet computers in the lobby. There was a male and female singer. The male was bad – he really didn’t have any vocal training and he lost the beat a few times and was off key occasionally as well. The female was pretty good, but then a different woman came out as she was as bad as the guy.

So you have a resort with bad food, cold pools, dangerous tile and no access to the beach outside of daylight hours.

I will not come back to this resort. In fact, I will probably not go any Sands resort again due to this experience. AJ, if you are reading this (she recommended it), I’m sure it was great for you when you rep’d it, but it’s gone straight downhill since then.