For our next trip to Europe we chose the GUITART ROSA hotel in Spain. There were three of us on this trip: me, Olya and our friend Dima.
The arrival was standard: we went through passport control, collected our suitcases and got on the bus. The bus doesn’t take you to the hotel — the streets there are narrow and a tour bus can’t get through — so they explain how to walk to the hotel (2 blocks from the main road).
Check-in. Check-in was quick and trouble-free: they scanned our passports, took the tourist tax (3.5 euros for the whole stay) and gave us a key to the luggage room (we arrived early in the morning, so we left our bags in the luggage room until 15:00). Oddly, check-in at this hotel is at 15:00, although the international standard is 14:00. At 15:00 they gave us the room key, and that was that.
Rooms. The hotel is old, and its rooms are also waiting for renovation. The furniture is old and a bit creaky too. The lock on the room door is an ordinary toilet-door handle with a key cylinder on one side. The room is clean, with a balcony and a TV — but the TV remote costs extra. The bathroom had a toilet, a sink, a bidet, a bath (not a shower), a curtain (so you could wash as if in a shower rather than pouring a bucket of water onto the floor), one bath mat, and one body towel and one face towel per guest. I’d like to say a separate word about the mini toiletries. They sort of exist (shampoo, soap, shower gel), but they sort of don’t. They’re only replenished once every 3 days, no matter that you want to wash every day. There are also 2 disposable cups, which are never replaced. There’s no soundproofing! You can make out the words of people talking 2 floors above us. You can even hear someone brushing their teeth in the next room in the morning. In short, the walls are not made of cardboard but of thin toilet paper. If you’re a light sleeper, this hotel is definitely not for you. The room has a good big safe, but unfortunately without a lock cylinder, so it’s paid… We left our things out and nobody stole anything. There’s no fridge or minibar in the room. The Wi-Fi, like everything in this hotel, is there but isn’t there. It picks up and connects throughout the hotel, including in the rooms, but even text messages could take several minutes to send, and eventually not go through at all.
The grounds. The hotel grounds are spacious by European standards: lots of flower beds and a pool. Anyone can walk onto the hotel grounds from the street and sit, for example, on the terrace of the hotel bar.
Breakfasts. We only took breakfasts, so I’ll only talk about them. I don’t understand why people complain about the breakfasts: in other European countries breakfasts are much worse at hotels in this price range. Yes, the breakfasts here are monotonous, but there’s a fairly wide choice of dishes, so you don’t have to eat the same thing every day. There’s some kind of porridge (I don’t eat it and don’t know much about it), various muesli and cereals, preserves and jams, butter and sour cream (possibly not sour cream but yoghurt), lettuce leaves, something else I didn’t look at closely, 2–3 kinds of sweet pastries (croissants, buns), something with beans in sauce, fried or boiled sausages, fried bacon, fried eggs or an omelette, brown and white mini baguettes, 2–3 kinds of bread ? including toast bread, 2–3 kinds of sausage, ham, 1–2 kinds of cheese ?, tomatoes, cucumbers, sauces, 5–6 kinds of tea in bags, 2 coffee machines ☕️, 2 kinds of juice from a dispenser (orange and pineapple), and milk. If something ran out, within 2–3 minutes the empty tray was swapped for a full, fresh one. The only thing that really spoiled my opinion of breakfast was an incident on the last day of our stay, when a piece of bacon fell onto our table at breakfast and a staff member picked it up with tongs and put it back with all the other pieces…
Service. Towels are changed if you leave them in the bath; bed linen is changed every 2–3 days. I described the mini toiletries a bit above. Cleaning is fine, no problems. At reception they smile, say they’ll solve whatever problem you’ve run into — and forget.
The beach. Clean, beautiful, fine shell sand. There are various cafés all along the beach, plus free toilets and an outdoor shower.
Excursion prices from the hotel guides (ours were from Anex) and from local agencies hardly differ, so we booked excursions with the hotel guide. We took “PortAventura and Ferrari Land”, “The South of France” and “Knights’ Tournament and Flamenco with drinks”. We didn’t like the last one.
Location. The GUITART ROSA hotel is located at Carrer de Sant Pere, 67, 17310 Lloret de Mar, Girona, Spain. At the end of our holiday we found a supermarket one block from the hotel; before that, we’d been driving to a supermarket on the other side of town. The hotel is close to the sea — a 5-minute leisurely walk through shopping streets.
Would I come here again? Yes to Spain, with pleasure — but no to the GUITART ROSA hotel. The main reason I won’t go back to this hotel is the soundproofing I wrote about above.
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