Ponient Vila Centric by PortAventura World

Stayed as we were visiting PortAventura World for the first time, and as an affiliated hotel thought this would be a great choice. Sadly we have been left quite disappointed. When we arrived at the hotel, around 12 noon, we walked in and were just stared at by the two staff members on reception. No greeting, no smiles, just stares as if we were doing something wrong by being there. We explained we knew we were early but asked if we could leave our luggage and go to the bar or pool until it was time to check in (as our welcome email said we could do this). We were straight away told "No, all are closed come back at 3pm". So we were left to find a cafe and wait there for 3 hours, carrying all our luggage and large pack of waters that we had brought for our stay. When we arrived back at 2.45pm, we had to sit and wait until exactly 3pm before any staff would check us in, despite our room being ready- the first time this has ever happened and just very odd. Our welcome email also stated all the hotel's services would be available to us before the check in time, which clearly isn't true. This was a really disappointing start to our stay, and not how we imagined to be welcomed into our PortAventura hotel. We were told when we purchased our additional tickets for Ferrari Land on checking in that the last shuttle bus was at 9.45pm back to the hotel. We arrived at 9.25pm at the pick up point, yet no bus arrived. We waited until 10pm and called the hotel. We were told that they would call the company to find out where they were, and call me back. This never happened at all, and to this day no one has contacted me to apologise or explain, meaning it got to 10.30pm and we're basically stranded at the park, so we had no option but to walk the long 45 minutes back to the hotel, as the taxis had also all left for the evening. We never had an apology or any explanation of what had happened. We also found it very odd that when we asked to buy the additional tickets, it was almost like they didn't want to sell them to us, suggesting we go to both parks during our one full day. We explained that we didn't want to do this as there was a late opening for Ferrari Land that evening, so we wanted to do that and enjoy the full next day at PortAventura Park. The same happened the day before our last day, when we wanted to buy tickets to enjoy the park for a couple of hours before we set off home, where the gentleman on reception just kept telling us to come back tomorrow, and then when he did sell the tickets, they had a validity date of the day before, meaning we had to go back again to reception to check they would actually work when we got to the park. I would have thought staff would want to upsell extra tickets as much as possible! This was our first trip to PortAventura, so we believed that staying in a PortAventura hotel would be the best option for us and leave us with the best experience. Sadly this wasn't the case at Hotel Vila Central. The room was lovely