This is my first review with pictures, so let's see how it goes. This is a review of my 2-night stay at the Park Plaza Histria in Pula, Croatia.

The hotel, or resort rather, is not really in Pula but in nearby Verudela. It is a hotel area a few kilometres outside of Pula. It's so far so you don't want to walk. The Verudela area is swamped with tourists, but the shores are quite nice and there are quite a few paths for strolls. But don't expect anything private and secluded...

The hotel front:

[IMG] IMG_3060 by niksal, on Flickr[/IMG]

The hotel is recently renovated, and appears quite luxurious. I don't have a picture of the lobby, but it is large and spacious, very bright and white. The actual check-in went smoothly, there's enough people serving you at the reception. Funnily enough, they didn't want to see my credit card but they wanted to take a copy of my Club Carlson Concierge Card.

I had booked at clubcarlson.com a Park View room, using the 10% discount code for Gold and Concierge members. I don't know if it should be considered an upgrade or not, but we got a room facing the pool and the bay behind it.

What was very interesting was also, that we had "room & breakfast & dinner ticked on our room card. This we found surprising, as we specifically had not chosen the package including dinner. More on this later...

The room:


IMG_3043 by niksal, on Flickr

The room itself was perfectly adequate, but nothing special. It was very modern and quiet. The bed was comfortable. I really can't complain about the room in any way.

There was also a welcome gift waiting for us:

[IMG] IMG_3042 by niksal, on Flickr[/IMG]

The bathroom had a shower, and was perhaps a bit on the smaller side, but it had everything we needed.

[IMG] IMG_3045 by niksal, on Flickr[/IMG]

The view from the balcony was quite nice. The whole area is very nice, definitely recommend visiting! It seems to be quite popular to see the coast by boat.


IMG_3047 by niksal, on Flickr

The pool area is also quite nice. The ocean is right behind it.

[IMG] IMG_3046 by niksal, on Flickr[/IMG]

So quite nice?

Well....

Remember the dinner? Arriving quite late, we decided to try it out. That was a big mistake. First of all, we could just march in. Nobody asked us for the room number, not until we ordered drinks and wanted to put the drinks on the room tab.The dinner was a buffet, with admittedly a decent selection of things. But the quality was poor. Just as an example, I took a piece that was marked "beef". Well, it was liver. A nice piece of liver, but still liver. The other clients were eastern European tourists (Russian, Hungarian and Polish if I could tell correctly from the languages) on a package holiday.

We then noticed, that there were about 10 folders by different tour organizers at the reception. Apparently it was just easier for the hotel to give everyone the free dinner and breakfast (no room numbers checked there either) rather than monitoring who was entitled to it and who wasn't. I don't mind packaged holidays, but now most of the people had their "pool clothes" on for breakfast and some cases weren't exactly good for my appetite.

Remember the nice pool? Well, unless you got there by 7am, you couldn't get a sunbed as they were already reserved with empty towels. The signs forbidding that were of course ignored both by guests and staff.

So we ended up not spending so much time at the hotel. We went outside of the hotel area for the day and managed to find a spot on the cliffs for our two towels. That was rather difficult, as the shores were swamped with tourists from around 10 similar resorts!

When we checked out after our two nights, the bill was presented in kunas rather than euros (my booking confirmation had the price in euros). That's understandable. But only after I had presented my credit card, I started to do the math. Something wasn't right, I was paying around 80 euros too much. I went back to the reception and pointed this out. Immediately the staff at the reception admitted "that the system made a mistake". I was refunded 32 euros in cash, the rest I guess is due to currency movements.

So what's my verdict? First of all I'm hesitant if I want to go to Pula again. We went to Porec (1 hour north of Pula) afterwards, and that was much nicer (Hotel Palazzo is amazing!). If I would go to Pula, I doubt I would choose this hotel. There's another Park Plaza next to the Histria. It was targeted at families with children. I don't have children, so that wouldn't be for me either. I don't know what nor where the third Park Plaza is. So in conclusion, I would say the Park Plaza Histria is a very good hotel itself, the service is adequate (just be careful what you pay), but it is very sad that the hotel doesn't want to follow up on the high standards the building and the surroundings would suggest.

Anyone have any other experiences of this resort?