Hotel Cala Reale

The room was clean and decent, but things became less reliable after the first three days, when the internet stopped working. For two evenings, the hot water was only lukewarm. Breakfast was the same every day, with too few choices to mix things up. Parking was available, though it was almost always full even when it didn't look like every room was occupied.

Great people and a lovely atmosphere here. The breakfast was great, and so was the music. It had everything we needed!

The shuttle to La Pelosa was handy, parking was free, and the cleaning staff and Massimiliano were friendly and helpful. Those were the bright spots. Wi-Fi barely worked, and pool towels cost €3.50 each time you changed them, which I’ve never come across at other European hotels. We’d booked a “sea view” room months ahead, but from the balcony the sea was barely visible because we were facing another building. At checkout I brought it up, and the receptionist kept insisting it was my fault and said she’d never heard of a partial sea view. It felt like the hotel neither makes sure guests get the room they paid for nor understands its own descriptions. Breakfast was dull: bread like supermarket bread, one kind of pre-sliced cheese, and not much else. After a week I started bringing my own food. The hotel could have done more to show off Sardinia’s food traditions. Getting there was rough. Our flight was delayed and the drive was long, so we arrived around 10 p.m., exhausted. The receptionists were polite, but nobody offered water or help even though they knew everything nearby was closed. A restaurant close by kindly gave us bottles of water. Checkout was the worst. Nobody asked how the stay had been. The receptionist didn’t seem to know our booking and asked how long we’d been there. When we asked for a discount because of the room, she reluctantly gave €50, as if doing us a huge favor, sighing, banging things around, then leaving without a thank you or goodbye. There was no real acknowledgment of the inconvenience and no offer of breakfast despite our early departure. Coming from customer service, I think this hotel could improve a lot with little effort: take better care of guests, describe rooms accurately, serve a decent breakfast, and provide basic amenities. As it is, it feels stuck in the 1980s and comes across as misleading and unprofessional, especially for a three-star hotel.

This is a review of the restaurant only, not the hotel. We had a set-menu dinner in a fairly nice atmosphere, but the food was nowhere near as good. The salads were poor, the pasta and fish tasted old, and most of it was bland. The setup was confusing, somewhere between table service and self-service, and the meal was like something from a low-grade motorway grill. We were staying around the corner. As we were leaving to pay, our waiter said the bill would be charged to our hotel. Then a woman at the front told us we had to pay there. Paying wasn’t the issue, but she went on to scold us for believing the waiter and said we should have known better. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well with us Italians. Rude service, poor food, and overpriced. Save your money and eat somewhere else.