빌라 비크 - 호텔 부티크

The Hotel Villa Vic, Arrecife, lanzarote is a small boutique hotel with about 14 rooms. We were half board and took lunch on 5 of the 6 days there. It is very well appointed and delightfully presented. It is dramatically understaffed and our stay was marked by moments of chaos and high farce with the guests helping to clear up and sort things our for themselves. Janet, my wife has a lactose intolerance. The menu is restricted and she found dinner on the first night difficult. Next morning we asked Abdul, the sole member of staff if her intolerance could be accommodated, he said yes and would inform the chef, he didn't and dinner that night and subsequent nights was a matter of giving her a meal with the lactose component extracted. Very few people were eating at night so a different sauce for her should have not been a problem. Wednesday and Thursday breakfasts were utterly chaotic, the young lady could not cope on her own with greeting new arrivals, waiting on tables, cleaning up, coffee, and forgetting peoples' orders. On Thursday we started breakfast at 8.45 am and at 10.30 Janet was told the coffee machine had broken - I had given up as had a zoom call. In a nutshell, this place is somewhere between the white lotus and faulty towers. Clearly, one person could not cope with the differing demands of so many guests. I have to say that I could add other points to this but the above serves to give a good picture.

The hotel was very under staffed. There appeared to be only 1 member of staff available. That member of staff would be covering the reception, the bar area and the dining area. Found it almost impossible to get any service when needed. On our first night we discovered that there weren’t any sheets on the bed. We tried phoning reception at least 5 times without any answer. I ended up going down to reception and ringing the bell. Nobody answered. Eventually the staff member who was serving dinner came. I explained the situation and the staff member then disappeared to reappear with a couple of sheets for us to fit ourselves. Our room was ok and we had a large terrace with hot tub. Unfortunately the hot tub wasn’t working properly. We didn’t have an evening meal at the hotel but it appeared to be fully booked most evenings. There is a sign in the room advising you not to drink the tap water. However, no bottled water was provided. There was now tea/coffee making facility in the room and due to the under staffing it wasn’t possible to get any room service because the phone was never answered.