Vella Beach Hotel

The rooms were very clean, and the staff were polite. They provide everything you need. The maid Ashe was the best, and I was charmed by her name, Sam. The masseuse... The food was very good, varied and tasty, and there were as many drinks as you wanted. I’d come back. Best staff again, thank you for the attention you gave us. The hotel.

The evening music was very loud, and there were lots of Russian guests who cut in line. The hotel seemed to accept it, since staff spoke Russian better than English. One guest returned to find someone had defecated on a sunbed beneath his towel, then put the towel back. The hotel said it was a cat, apparently a very large and clever one that could replace the towel. The buffet was awful. The same old yellow mozzarella appeared every day. At the egg station, fried eggs and omelets seemed to alternate, so on fried-egg days you couldn’t get an omelet. After one week, I was sick of chicken. I also booked a spa treatment for our last day, but when I arrived the price had doubled and they couldn’t do it until the next day. One guest who did get a treatment had her ribs bent. The rooms had bedbugs and cockroaches, which we recorded on video. We changed rooms twice before finally getting one that had just been vacated and had no bedbugs. The manager denied there was a problem until we asked if he wanted to see the videos before we made them public. Other guests complained about bedbugs too, and a staff member told me that 220 of the 330 rooms had them. Not even Monty Python could have come up with this for Fawlty Towers.

The food was pretty good, especially the fresh chicken and fries cooked by the guy at the pool. We also liked being able to reach the beach through a tunnel from the pool. Breakfast wasn't great, so we usually skipped it. The rest of the stay was awful. At arrival, we were told our rooms weren’t ready and had to spend a night in another room before switching in the morning. Those rooms stank, had mold, and no windows. When I complained, a different room suddenly became available, with a balcony and everything we had paid for. People I was traveling with also noticed a turd on a bench, hopefully from a cat or something, and unfriendly staff who could barely communicate in English. Our safe stopped working with the code we’d set the day before, and then we had cockroaches in the room. We wouldn't recommend this place. It isn't worth the money. A resort should meet higher standards, especially if it wants people to come back. People pay good money to enjoy their holiday.

There were safety and service problems all over the place. The floors were slippery and people fell, there was broken glass in the lift, and a wire by the pool light was exposed and not working. The pools looked cloudy, there was nowhere to sit around them, and there was no safe place for the kids to dance. My children can't swim, so the lack of seats was especially difficult. The kids' club was just a table with plain paper and broken crayons. We booked a room for four but got only two beds, the TV didn't work, and no one welcomed us. One person served drinks without smiling and kept pointing and asking for tips. The food was flavorless, served raw, and the same every day. I got ill from it. The fans near the food were dirty. This wasn't all-inclusive: many drinks cost extra, and the included drinks came one at a time in small glasses. The self-service drinks were in even smaller cups. There weren’t enough English-speaking staff for us to communicate. Don't waste your money.