I stayed there last week of June, and below is my TripAdvisor review of the hotel, updated with some HH details.
I booked one room at this hotel back in January when the rates were very low (50% off), and when nobody knew nothing about this hotel. I booked a second one in May (40% off). Great thing - no moeny taken in advance, even if they were AP rates
Arrival and check-in
We arrived by car, and finding the hotel was quite a challenge, as there is no comprehensive driving map on the hotel website. After driving-around Golden Sands for ~20 minutes we arrived at the hotel and we were ready for check-in. The hotel has 2 wings: Helios hotel (4 east-European stars) to the left and Doubletree (5 east-European stars) to the right. As a HH Diamond we were expected by the staff and were given 2 fantastic suites, on 5th and 7th floor. One of them was not ready at time of check-in, but 2 hours later was in order. Last year in Greece they did not seem to know what HH Diamond means, but here I really felt "special", the hotel went out of their way to accomodate us in the best way possible.
The Room
We got room 701, one of the 2 suites on each floor, both with a sea-view. It is a corner suite with an entree, small bathroom, huge living room with bar area, and large bedroom with desk area and en-suite master bathroom. Both the bedroom and living room have a door towards a very large balcony, with great view of the entire resort.
Living room has an expandable sofa and 3 armchairs, enough for a large group to gather round for drinks, games or just chit-chat
. TV is a 50" plasma with enough channels to keep children and adults happy.
Bedroom is very big, with king bed, separate desk area and 37" plasma TV. Linens are new and refreshed every 3 days or on-demand. We had 4 very comfortable pillows. The bed is a bit soft per my taste, but opinions may differ.
Master bathroom is not very large but has a corner bath-tub, definitely a plus. Amenities were the usual Neutrogena, but not refreshed every day. Towels were not new, but good quality and changed daily.
The overall quality of the furniture and appliances is good to very good, but not excellent. For a sea-side resort it is great, but it should not be compared with regular business-hotels.
We had free internet as Diamonds and received first a password for the WiFi. The signal was very poor and then we received 2 LAN cables (one for each room). No password was asked throughout the stay and we did not pay for it at the end. It could be a loophole, but I guess anybody comeing with a cable from home would get free internet in the room
The hotel
We stayed for 7 days and since we did not have very good weather we experienced every area of the hotel.
- the outside pools are very nice and provide a wide area of attractions. There is a whirlpool, a small pool for babies, a mid-sized pool and a large pool with 2 water-chutes. The lounge chairs in front of the DT were made from wood frame and fabric, while the ones in front of the Helios hotel (the large pool) were made out of plastic.
- the inside pool is large and guarded by 1-2 lifeguards at all times. It is great for small babies as it is heated at all times. Downsides - very high Chlorine concentration and very slippery floors in the adjacent toilet.
- the parking lot is shared by the 2 hotels and is full of private cars, though always easy to find a parking space.
- fitness room is quite small (~30sqm), but very modern equipment. At most we saw 3 people using the 6-7 fitness equipments there.
- we did not try the Spa, but it looked very well.
- Nearby they will build a Hilton hotel and one can easily see the construction site. They do not perform any work during summer-time, so the noise and dust issues reported earlier by other guests will not have any impact during mid- and peak-season.
- there is an exchange booth at Reception, with very poor rates. Best idea is either to take money from ATM or change at the several bank branches. Closest one to hotel is Unicredit (just in front of the DT while looking at the sea), and most convenient is at the hotel's beach (OTP Bank).
The Beach
If you are planning to spend your holiday at the beach, this is probably not the best location. The resort is situated along the Black Sea, and hotels are uphill. The Doubletree is probably one of the farthest hotels from the beach, but to be fair it only takes 5 minutes for an adult to get there. Going back it's going to be ~15 minutes. if you have children or babies, you can easily double that.
The hotel has a private beach in the resort, oddly situated at the opposite side of the resort, not in front of the hotel. There is a 14+1 seats mini-bus which makes regular trips to the beach, but we only used it one day. It left on-time from the hotel and only by luck we got in, there were other people in the lobby who did not have any left room. The hotel should give more thought to this next year.
The private beach is contracted from a local company and is very nice. Plenty of lounge-chairs (or so we thought), a beach-bar with decent prices and also free drinks for the all-inclusive clients. For all-inclusive guests the lounge-chairs were free, for the rest they were 10 BGN for 2 lounge chairs and 1 umbrella.
The sea-shore at this beach though was poor, as it was full of large rocks. The tides were strong and you had to either stay on the shore or well into the water in order not to get hit to the legs by 1-3kg large rocks
. The beach 200m away (in front of the big casino hotel) was much better.
The Restaurant and Food
We did not have an all-inclusive package and we think we made the right decision. Breakfast had a lot of menu options, but the quality was definitely not 5 stars. I stayed in many other Hilton and Doubletree hotels, this hotel needs to improve its quality. The egg-station was OK but operated by people who work very slow; in addition, I can make better-looking and better-tasting fried eggs at home... The juices had nothing to do with natural, and were not even good-quality Tetra-Pak like in other places. The cheese, salami and vegetables station were OK, but incomparable to a 5* Doubletree (see Kos in Greece or Istanbul - Turkey). We always ate well, but can't say I enjoyed breakfast too much.
We tried to have dinner several nights at the hotel, but there were too few items on the menu, and all standard international dishes, nothing from the local cuisine, which is really good. Prices are good though, 3 people had decent dinner for 50 BGN. Much better food and service at the local restaurants on the way to the beach.
Overall, we had a great stay here and will come back next years, but will adjust our expectations. It is a nice sea-side hotel, but not 5 stars "Hilton" beach-side hotel. If one books this for the Hilton brand and expectations from Hilton business hotels, they will be deeply disappointed. If one books this hotel as a good 4* chain-hotel on the eastern-European sea-side, he will have a great stay!
Room Tip: Rooms X01 - x26 have sea-view, rest of them have forest view. Regular rooms on 7th floor have smaller balconies, or so it looked from outside.
HH Points:
Invoice is from Helios hotel, and the info in the invoice is veeery confusing, as they break the daily rates into 2 or 3 pax, so you get 2 pages of daily rates for each traveller, absolutely futile if it's just one family... After one week points were not credited, so I emailed Diamond Desk. They replied that they can't find the reservations I had attached, and asked to get the credit card statement. I sent the saved reservations, the scanned invoice and the pdf statement, and withing 2 hours got a very nice present:
- Base points - 7500 points
- Q2 bonus - 7000 points
- Q3 bonus - 7500 points (we checked-out on 01-July)
- Great Getaway bonus - 7500 points
- Diamond Bonus - 3750 points
- BMI miles - 3000
I uploaded some pictures on Tripadvisor, I can share more with anyone interested.