Matkat – La Oliva

Apartment was immaculate and staff were super helpful and friendly. Would recommend The Esmeralda to anyone

Overall a great hotel. Strong points are as follows; quite tidy and neat in the communal areas, good food at the breakfast and dinner buffets, polite staff, brilliantly easy access to the pool, complimentary cava in the afternoons, breathtaking views from the sea facing room! So pretty strong on most fronts. Negatives are as follows; caters mostly to German travellers but would certainly help if English proficiency was stronger amongst reception. Needless to say they were extremely helpful and did their best to understand me and my requests, so this is a minor (more of an experience thing than a functional thing). The next negative was with room cleanliness- now dont get me wrong they are spotless to the naked eye! But I did find a couple of light-ish wood louse looking creatures, once crawling up the bed and another time on arrival inside the cupboard. The housekeeping staff were awesome though, and did a fantastic job at cleaning the room each time they attended. So for this reason I only deducted one star for cleanliness. At least there weren’t any bed bugs. Facilities I gave a three because for starters, the gym is tiny- very difficult to get a workout in there when it was busy. I was expecting it to be small but some minor tweaks could certainly helped, e.g. making the mirror above the dumbells stretch the width of the wall so both benches can see their reflection. Secondly, some form of paid room service would’ve been nice for lunch.

I had an amazing time on my solo trip but I had no idea it was a German based resort. I booked Spain because I was travelling solo and Spanish is the language I speak but all of the leaflets and instructions were German. I managed of course as most staff had very good English/spanish. I would say the hotel is not suitable for anyone with any restrictions in their health. I’ve lost 30kg in the last year but still found all the stairs and hills, especially from the beach, quite tiring. One night I missed dinner due to being on a boat trip in the afternoon and I had nothing to eat besides some dry bread and the bar staff offered me some peanuts. I found it unusual that an all inclusive didn’t have anything substantial to eat available after 9pm. The last hotel I stayed in had a snack bar open till 12am, and there was nowhere outside of the hotel I could walk to for food. Besides these small issues, I had a wonderful time! Thank you