Vilar Rural de Sant Hilari by Serhs Hotels

It was pretty okay, but dirty in a lot of places, especially around breakfast. The worst part was the rude bartender on Saturday night. There were plenty of guests, but they couldn’t be bothered, and the experience was disappointing for everyone. I won’t be back.

Maybe families with kids will like it for the activities, but as a regular hotel, I’d skip it. It’s not a four-star place by any stretch, and I was very disappointed. The walls are paper thin, so it gets noisy. The WC extractor is loud and keeps running for ages. The old mattresses sag, and not in a comfortable way. Whether travelling alone or as a couple, I wouldn’t come here. For families with children, perhaps.

It feels a bit overrated. In winter, they should adjust the service for the weather. They said the pool was heated, but the water was cold, not hot. The lobbies and corridors were freezing too, including the walk of about 500 metres to the pool. The food is good, and it seems like a great place to bring kids if it’s summer and not raining. They speak Catalan and Spanish, but no English.

After hours on the road, we’d been put off by a terrible campsite about 15 minutes away, so we booked this room at the last minute. We arrived at 16:00 and still had to wait for the rooms to be ready. That seemed odd to me at that hour. The room was clean and the bathroom was nice, with soap and paper available, but the water temperature kept changing. The sheets had holes and stains. When we called reception, they said the cleaner had already left and we’d have to change them ourselves. At the bar, we tried to enjoy our welcome drink, but a kid kept banging a wooden stick on the railing. I asked him to stop, and he carried on. Later, I told his parents outside the bar that it was annoying, but they seemed not to care and were nearly drunk. The same sort of thing happened at dinner, with kids banging things on the table. The restaurant glasses weren’t quite clean, and some of the meat wasn’t thoroughly cooked. There were loads of food options, which was very good. The guests eating there were all chewing with their mouths open like babies, which was really off-putting. For a four-star hotel, I didn’t expect this. The whole experience felt more like a kindergarten full of poor families than a nice four-star stay.