Estival Islantilla

Good afternoon . my name is Fisenkco Dmitri I lived from 06/04/24 to 06/13/24 I left a cash deposit of 50 euros, on 06/14 55.43 euros were withdrawn from my account. when I checked out, I asked if I had to pay anything extra, I was told that everything was fine, I didn’t owe anything. In fact, I was simply deceived by the reception staff. namely Christina, she took cash from me. Yes, as for service and room service. I was with my family and asked for a room with a non-smoking area, they didn’t seem to hear me and they put me in a room above the restaurant terrace overlooking road number 252, naturally they were smoking on the terrace and this smoke was coming into my room, after a couple of days my patience ran out and I asked for a different room... they gave me room 185, at least they cleaned it and changed the towels than in the previous one... I don’t know what influenced this, my passport, my nationality... Some of the staff don’t speak English and no one even knows German , which complicates communication. Now about the system of drinks and food: drinks, especially cocktails by the pool, are simply terrible, how can you drink such slop, like a 4-star hotel. different prices between branches of different bars by the pool when I bought ice cream, despite the fact that the prices should be the same (fraud). As for the food, although here they were up to par... but there is also a point: you cannot order tea and coffee for cash during dinner. I had half board, which did not include alcoholic drinks, which was kept silent at the reception, and the tour operator TUi said that I only had to pay for alcohol...

The best: Excellent hotel, excellent food, very reasonable drinks, very friendly and available staff, excellent beach but it is very difficult to walk and go to the bath due to the huge amount of broken shells in the sand, the pool is excellent. Worse: This year I had a cockroach with 8cm in my bed walking all over me at 3am and I had to call reception to have the animal removed. We didn't sleep anymore that night and no one took responsibility or wanted to alleviate the damage caused.

To start the hotel itself is really lovely looking, it is quite big! It has a good selection of pools for all ages, there is a waterslide pool, a main pool and two younger children's pools, there are a choice of 3 different bars and a snack bar to choose from out of meal times which was really good. The hotel also has access to a lovely beach just out of the gate and also has a shop on site which was really handy We unfortunately left our pram at Faro airport but the TUI rep Stuart at the hotel was so helpful in explaining what we would need to do to get it back and even found out from the hotel reception that they actually had one that we could hire for the week which was a life saver. The rooms were spacious and quite modern but also a little dated in some areas. The towels were replaced every other day which we didn't mind about, the cleaners however we didn't feel were up to scratch, every day they would come in and make the bed and clean the toilet then leave, the floor was only mopped once the whole week, which, with an 18month old and going to the beach etc you can imagine the floor wasn't the cleanest, I ended up having to wear flipflops in the room or my feet would be covered in bits. The air conditioning wasn't great, it felt like it was kicking out warm air at some parts of the night, but, luckily in June it wasn't scorching outside so we could put up with it. The food at the hotel was really really nice, we couldn't fault it one bit, every breakfast was similar kind of food (obviously) but they always tried to mix it up with different fruits, yoghurts etc. The lunch seemed to be different every day and always lots of choice, the evening meal had a theme every night of the week which was really good. You could walk up and get your own alcoholic or non alcoholic drink which was easier. Usually we would go out for a meal one or two nights on a holiday as the food usually gets a bit samey but we didn't feel we had to and thought a meal out might have even been worse. People have mentioned that there are queues to get into the restaurant, it's really not bad, you maybe waiting for about a minute as the staff on the door really try and accommodate quickly. A little moan we had was that sometimes we thought we were at school, the hotel have set rules throughout and they really abide by them (which is understandable to a point), for example we sat at a table that the staff didn't assign to us in the dining room once and was asked why we had sat there. I also wore a bikini covered with high waisted shorts in the snack bar area and was told to go and put a top on. The pool doesn't open until 10am even though you are allowed to sit around it on the sunbeds, which, with kids you are just asking for them to jump in rather than wait, but, you will be asked to leave if you step in before 10am. I did want to point out though that another review said they were strict about sunbeds and moved peoples towels if they weren't sat on them for a short w