Hotiday Hotel Isola D'elba

I have no complaints about the hotel or its main building, but this review is for Hotiday. For €331 for one night, booking through Hotiday got us a room with no elevator or Wi-Fi, a tiny windowless bathroom, no balcony, and a clogged shower. The double bed was made up of two twin beds of different sizes. Don’t expect a 4-star hotel if you book this way.

We ate at the restaurant one evening and thought it was good value: €30 per person for a wide choice of starters, main courses, side dishes, and desserts. Breakfast was plentiful, with lots of choice and good-quality products. The pool is very spacious, though it could use some maintenance. The hotel is about 300 meters from its private beach, and parking costs €10 per day, which is recommended because outdoor spaces are limited. We booked through Hotiday and were discouraged at first by the bad reviews, but changed our minds. Our room was clean and had a pleasant balcony, in an adjacent separate building on the third floor. There’s no elevator. The young staff were very helpful, and there’s an entertainment program that’s especially suitable for children. I’d recommend this hotel to families with children, but people without children, like us, might want to look elsewhere.

The services, cleanliness, and food were good, and the waiters were really kind. It seemed in line with what we paid, though the description left out too much. The beach photos don’t match what you get: the straw umbrellas shown are different from the umbrella assigned to you for the whole week, which was in the 11th row on the left, with no more than 3.5 meters between umbrellas. The Booking reservation through Hotiday Hotel puts you, as expected, in the building at the back, even though the place looks like Uappala Hotel when you arrive. You have to pay €10 per day for outdoor parking behind a barrier. Nobody showed us to the room, and we had to carry our luggage up to the third floor because there’s no elevator.

We asked to change rooms, and the receptionist, Mr. Haykel, did everything he could, even leaving the desk to try fixing the air conditioning. But the hotel was full, and as Hotday guests rather than hotel guests, there weren’t any convenient solutions. The bedding was so thin that we both ended up with back pain. Breakfast was absolutely disgusting, so we had to eat out every morning. Housekeeping didn’t replace the sheets or towels. Even when we put towels on the floor, they were just folded and handed back, so we had to go downstairs and ask for clean ones. The room itself was nothing like the modern photos on Booking.com. The page had just two reviews with an average score of 9.5/10, which made us think the place was new and reassured us. Instead, Hotiday rents a few rooms from a hotel called Uapala, and ours was in a separate building on the third floor with no elevator. I have a disability, and I’d paid for a 4-star hotel. When I contacted the hotel, they said I should have mentioned it beforehand, as if a 4-star hotel could reasonably have no elevator. The air conditioning struggled even at maximum, despite staff trying to fix it. The hairdryer had no power and seemed to be there just for show. The minibar was just as useless because it barely worked.