Just back from a pleasant but unspectacular few days at the Valentin Park Club. It's a perfectly ok hotel and decent value for money if you're looking for something reasonable towards the cheaper end of the spectrum. It's clean clean, pleasant, safe and well located. However, there are a couple of areas where for me the hotel fell a bit short of expectations. Firstly, there are restrictions on the availability of food on all inclusive. Service times for breakfast lunch and dinner are sensibly timed and a reasonable duration, but outside of these times the only other time you can get food is a small snack service window between 4:30 and 6pm. If you want food outside of these times, there isn't anything. For me part of the reason for paying for all inclusive is knowing that you can eat and drink what you want when you want which gives flexibility, i.e. if you miss a meal service time because you're doing other things, you can always at least get something. Certainly it caused a problem for me when I first arrived as I had the misfortune to get to the hotel slightly before 6pm, and as I was unaware that the snack bar was about to close I popped up to my room to unpack a few bits then went to look for something to eat - absolutely ravenous because I hadn't eaten since Luton airport about 7 hours before - only to find there was nothing available until my dinner service window started a couple of hours later at 8. I ended up walking down the road to buy a sandwich, which isn't a great start to an all inclusive experience. Secondly, I don't think the hotel has adapted very well to the recent change in Spanish law on all inclusive guests serving themselves alcoholic drinks, which they're now not allowed to offer. At the bars this isn't an issue as the service is pretty good and there aren't really any queues, but during meals the only way you can get an alcoholic drink is by table service. Not necessarily a problem, except that the waiting staff are constantly very busy and trying to catch someone's eye when you want a drink is almost impossible. In the course of six or seven meals I think I successfully managed to have a beer or a glass of wine with it maybe twice. I appreciate their hands are tied slightly by the law change, but surely there has to be a better way of doing it than that. On the positive side the hotel is very clean, the pools are lovely, there are plenty of loungers, it's well located, the rooms are cleaned every day and the staff are friendly and almost without exception impressively fluent in both English and German, which will cater for the vast majority of the guests very well. But I suspect the non all-inclusive board options might give a slightly better experience. It's an ok hotel in the price range, not awful, but not great either.
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