Pollensa Forum - Puerto Azul Aparthotel Review (with photos!)

My 10 year old son Jonny and I stayed in a 1 bedroom apartment at the Puerto Azul Aparthotel from 23 - 30 August 2011. I decided to write a review so if you decide to book this hotel you can get an honest review first. Plus, as you might expect, I took plenty of photos!

Before I start this review, a few bits of context:

1. We originally booked to stay at the Hotel Capri on the Pine Walk as I wanted a room with a sea view to take photos of the sunrise. Thanks to this forum I discovered in April that the Capri had shut down and had to swiftly book alternative accommodation. We were paying £540 for a twin room B&B to stay at the Capri.

2. Villa Concha, which is where we stayed last year, wanted £900 room only for a 1 bedroom apartment! So I didn't book the VC (even though it was really good there last year).

3. The Puerto Azul was rated the 3rd best hotel in PP according to reviews on Trip Advisor so my expectations were high that it would be an excellent hotel. The Villa Concha is only rated the 9th best hotel so I was expecting somewhere much better than the VC.

4. The Puerto Azul was advertised as having entertainment. As a rule I hate this kind of thing - it is usually awful and not my thing. The Villa Concha had evening entertainment but it was inside in their bar and our room was far enough away that we couldn't hear it. This was because it was inside and the sound was kept inside the building. That meant we could sit out on our balcony in peace and quiet playing cards while I drank a small (!) glass of wine. I had hoped that the Puerto Azul would be similar.

5. I managed to get a 1 bedroom apartment at the Puerto Azul for £600 half-board. In a similar way to entertainment, I wouldn't normally go for half-board as I would prefer to eat out for dinner. But at only £60 more than the Capri price dinner was almost a freebie so it wouldn't really matter if we didn't make use of the free dinner every evening.

So on to the review itself. Although the hotel had a lot of plus points, it also had a lot of minuses and overall i thought it was an OK hotel and if I was to rate it out of 5 I would give it a 3/5.

Plus Points

- It was only 3 minutes walk from the pine walk and the beach
- it was only 1 minute walk from a SPAR that stocked lovely fresh baguettes and pastries (plus pretty much everything else you would need)
- the Spanish reception staff were lovely - really helpful and very friendly
- there was free wi-fi in the reception (plus two power sockets so we could charge our laptop and iPhone/Pod Touch while surfing)
- the pool was fantastic and Jonny and I had many happy hours splashing around in it
- the maid cleaned the room everyday and they were all really friendly
- the room, restaurant and reception were all air conditioned but the a/c wasn't that strong (see minus points below)
- the view from the balcony was nice with a view of the mountains
- some of the food for breakfast and dinner was quite nice but as it was a buffet you had the usual problem of most of the hot food being lukewarm at best
- the pool opened at 9AM and most of the sun loungers were taken by 9. This didn't bother me as I hate sitting on sun loungers as I burn really easily. There were however lots of tables and chairs underneath an awning next to the sun lounger area and it was always possible for me to get a table and chair in the shade for me to sit on while Jonny played in the pool no matter what time of day we got there

Minus Points

- the "entertainment" was on a stage outside next to the pool. It went on until 11PM and was very noisy. Even though our room was very far away from it and faced away from the entertainment stage we could hear it clearly from our balcony which meant that we couldn't use our balcony in the evenings
- the "entertainment" was awful. As an Example: a Beatles tribute band played on one night. Despite the Beatles having so many songs that you could do a 5 hour set of their songs and still not play every one , this tribute act decided that they didn't have enough Beatles material to fill out a 1 hour set so played Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer and Status Quo's Rocking All Over the World as part of their set!!
- most of the food was average to poor
- the orange juice for breakfast wasn't proper OJ, it was orange squash (and cheap, nasty squash at that). I ended up taking in my own carton of Tropicana so that I could have OJ with my breakfast
- drinks weren't included with dinner, you had to pay for them. Waitresses came round to take your order for drinks which was fine except it usually took them 20 minutes to serve you (this was not the fault of the waitresses; there weren't enough for the number of diners). So you could either get some food and start eating as soon as you got to your table which would mean your drinks would come just as you finished your meal. Or you could wait for them to serve you and wait 30 minutes to get your drinks thus sitting not eating. They also didn't serve wine by the glass so I was forced to buy a half bottle if I wanted wine. Luckily the cheapest 1/2 bottle of white was only €6 and it was really nice so it wasn't a huge problem
- as I mentioned the air con wasn't particularly strong. In our room the minimum temperature you could set it to was 21°C in auto mode. You could put the fans on to manual but even at the highest setting the fan didn't blow out much cool air.
- the room was a little shabby in places and the bathroom had a slight musty smell
-we got ants in the kitchen area
- there was a fridge in the kitchen but we had to pay €2.50 a day to have it switched on (once on however the fridge was ice cold which was lovely)
- no cutlery or crockery was included in the kitchen. Luckily I found out about this in advance from trip advisor so I was able to bring our own
- our room (B318) was on the third floor but there was no direct lift to our floor. When we first arrived I couldn't find the lift so had to lug our 22kg case up 3 flights of stairs - not the best start to a holiday! It was only later on I discovered that there was a lift but it didn't come to our floor. It only serviced one floor down or one floor up so when we checked out I only had to negotiate one flight. However, it would have been much better if there was a lift access on every floor

So as you can see there were more minuses than pluses. Yes, many of the minuses were minor but the entertainment was the big minus. If you like entertainment - and many people at our hotel appeared to love it as the seats were full most nights - then you will probably love this hotel.

I didn't love this hotel but I didn't hate it. It was just above OK and so 3/5 would be a fair rating I think.

I'll post up some photos in a minute.