We’ve only just returned from Albania. In 2021 we chose a trip to Albania, specifically to the Primavera hotel. There were several reasons for choosing this trip to Albania: easy border crossing with no tests, vaccinations or anything else; the possibility of bringing in and flying a drone; mouth-watering descriptions of local dishes; beautiful nature and two seas.
The airport, arrival and departure are standard for European countries, so as before I won’t describe them in detail. The receiving agency was Aler Travel — here I will stop for a moment and tell you about this “mega-organisation”, but I’ll do so in the article Excursions in Albania.
Now let’s go through the Primavera hotel in order.
Check-in. We arrived at the hotel at about 17:00 local time and were checked in very quickly. They took copies of our passports, looked at the voucher, took us to the room and showed us where everything was.
Our room was on the 3rd floor, above the hotel’s main entrance. There’s no lift, so every day we worked our glutes and shook down the food we’d eaten. The room is spacious, but there was no separate place for suitcases: we stuffed one suitcase into the wardrobe, and the other stood by a chair. The room has one big double bed, 2 chairs, a desk, 2 bedside tables, a wardrobe, 3 sockets (one taken by the minibar), an empty minibar, a TV (which we never once turned on), air conditioning and 2 pairs of non-disposable rubber slippers. On the balcony there’s a small table, 2 plastic chairs, a clothes drying rack and a wonderful side view of the sea (at least in our case).
The air conditioner points directly at the bed, which is somewhat inconvenient, and the air conditioning is so-so anyway. It cooled very slowly and poorly.
I’d like to single out the bathroom. The toilet is ordinary but very noisy when flushed. The shower has no walls, door or even a curtain, so you flood the whole bathroom when you shower; because of this the toilet paper gets a bit damp, and in general it’s not very convenient and very slippery. There are 4 towels — 2 for the face and 2 for the body — but no bath mat, which again makes using a shower without slippers very awkward. Towels aren’t changed every day, and if a towel has fallen on the floor, they simply pick it up and that’s it. The soap is ordinary; the shampoo was a shop-bought bottle. The water drains very slowly from the shower tray: if 2 people shower one after the other, the tray fills up completely and starts to overflow. From a full tray, it takes about half an hour for the water to drain.
Internet. There are 2 routers on the 3rd floor; 1 of them was near our room, and I think that’s the one we connected to, because the signal was better there than on the other network. Nevertheless, the internet is very slow, with constant dropouts and reconnections to the router; often the Wi-Fi is connected but there’s simply no internet. In short, if the internet is important to you — for remote work, for example — the Primavera hotel won’t suit you.
About food and drinks in the room. At reception there are 2 pictures with a watermelon and a melon crossed out. In reality, nobody checks what you bring into your room. Before arriving in Albania I’d read that you weren’t allowed to bring food or drinks into the room, so I contacted the hotel by email and asked whether this was true. They replied that you can’t bring food or drinks into the room unless they were bought at the hotel restaurant/bar. We, of course, ignored that and bought drinks at the market. Another small downside: there’s only one bin in the room, a small one in the bathroom. There are no bins near the hotel either.
There’s a restaurant at the hotel; we didn’t go there. We’d read reviews saying they cheat tourists there by bringing huge bills after they’ve eaten. We can’t confirm or deny that — we simply decided not to go, especially since there are plenty of cafés and restaurants on this street, which I describe in a separate article.
Breakfasts are served in the bar as a buffet — or rather a “buffet table” :). All the food that’s supposed to be hot is cold. The only hot things are the tea and coffee. The tea isn’t tasty, the coffee is fine, and the juice is so-so — you can tell it has nothing to do with real juice. A tasty cheese omelette (albeit cold); the fried sausages are tasty in theory, but because they’re cold and a bit dried out, they don’t taste good. There were also fried eggs, toast fried in egg (instead of an omelette), watermelon, melon, olives, fresh cucumber and tomato, and some mayonnaise salad (the same one every day, slightly picked at — it felt as though that salad sat there all 7 days without ever being cleared away). Once there was pizza (again instead of sausages; cold pizza is tastier than cold sausages). There were processed cheese spreads and ordinary cheese triangles, no more, no less. Once there were croissants instead of fruit.
Location. The Primavera hotel is superbly located: almost right in the city centre, across the road from the sea, 1 block from the nearest supermarket, and there’s an ATM right by the hotel entrance. The first beach (sandy, with shallow water) is a 5-minute walk away. The second beach, a little before the tunnel, is 3 km away. The tunnel is a little over 3 km. Right opposite the hotel there’s a bus stop; for 30 lek you can ride to the Spar supermarket, and from there it’s about 1 km to the second beach, or a little over 1 km to the tunnel.
Service. The room itself was cleaned well, except for the bathroom (the towels weren’t changed but picked up off the floor and hung up). At breakfast, as I said, all the food was cold, but empty dishes were quickly refilled (again, with cold food). At reception we saw a staff member only 3 times: when we checked in, when we tried to find out about car rental (we had to wait 10 minutes and ring the bell for anyone to come), and at check-out (again we had to wait and ring). The rest of the time there was nobody at the desk.
The grounds. The Primavera hotel has no grounds to speak of. Or rather, there’s a small car park out the back and a small veranda for the restaurant, and that’s it.
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