In all my travels I've never posted a complaint about a hotel...
Just back from a wonderful holiday in Cape Verde. Speaks for itself the fact that's the 3rd time I've been in four years.
But I will never return to the Royal Decameron hotel on Boa Vista Island. And this is a 1st for me, I'm always happy to complain about products that aren't up to scratch but I've never written a criticism of a hotel.
Would love to have made this an amusing, pithy, critique but instead I'll just lay it out straight for you.
Despite it being in beautiful grounds and in a lovely rustic style, I have many complaints. Here's a random selection (in case you're considering Cape Verde and want something in the four-star region, avoid this hotel)...
The 1st time I turned on the shower, the shower head broke off its fixture and came crashing down onto my head. Lucky only to have a bruised head - it missed my eye. It took a couple of hours for them to send a man to fix a new shower head...while I waited to finish my shower.
I hung a dressing gown up on the hook in the bathroom and it came crashing down onto the bidet underneath it - hardly edifying! The hook-fixture literally came out of the wall. This is representative of the entire bedroom – everything was crumbling.
We had to request they put drain cleaner down the drain on day 2 when the shower was filling up to our ankles.
The bed looked about 20 years old, we've never seen such a lumpy, hard bed in our numerous travels. It took about 8 or 9 requests over 24 hours to get a few blankets to pad it out by stuffing them under the bottom sheet.
The pillows were so old and limp and it also required 8 or 9 requests to get extra ones over a 24 hour period.
There was a startling number of cockroaches around the whole property but especially lining up around the restaurant every night.
Obviously in a hot place you expect the odd cockroach but this was incredible – completely unacceptable – and in our previous two stays at other properties in Cape Verde we didn't see one.
Two large tropical spiders emerged from behind the bathroom mirror and when we requested bug spray we had to go through a virtual battle over 5 hours when finally they brought us bug poison at 11 PM.
We did not want to pack up everything and change bedroom (which they suggested when they were resisting giving us any bug spray) because obviously the other bedrooms could have had the same problem and this was 2 nights before leaving.
The only reason I think they resisted getting bug spray is because the insect man used to come onto the property every morning and obviously they were going to have to pay him extra to come back after 6 PM when the spiders emerged. They were large and ugly and as far as we know poisonous seeing as we were in a tropical place.
Overall if you asked an employee politely to do something they would say yes and it just wouldn't happen. This was stress we didn't need on a holiday.
Sadly this attitude of say-yes-but-do-nothing spoils it for the few friendly employees we interacted with at lunch/dinner. Alsothe chambermaids were particularly friendly and hard working - seeing as they were cleaning up rooms that should've been redecorated/freshened up a decade ago.
Also the pool-side recreation staff were very good - enthusiastic and friendly.
Otherwise the staff seemed grumpy and discontented. There certainly wasn't a friendly holiday vibe around.
Please do go to Cape Verde just choose a different hotel to this one! Have fun, Pam x