Very Crap Veracruz (Hotel Acuario (Veracruz, Mexico))

Member Name: zoe_page_1

Product:	Hotel Acuario (Veracruz, Mexico)
Date:	03/04/09 (229 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Near the beach

Disadvantages: Everything else!

Veracruz is known for its port and its aquarium, and when I was booking my hotels for my two night stay, I decided it might be nice to stay near the latter. It probably would have been, but I'll never know since the Hotel Acuario is rather misleadingly located more than 20 minutes walk from said aquarium.

I decided to stay in two different hotels for cost reasons. My first hotel was cheap and central, and a good place for exploring the city on my first day. My second hotel, this one, was slightly more expensive and slightly further out, but had a pool, and therefore was a good choice for my second night since I had already planned to spend part of my trip lying in the sun doing nothing.

Since I was already in town, I checked in early at about 2.30pm. My room was already ready (official check in is half an hour earlier) and the process was smooth with little in the way of paperwork. My first impressions of the room were not wonderful, though. This hotel claims to have 4* but this is a wild over statement. My room was a "single" which apparently translates as "one massive king-size bed, please". What I didn't notice until the evening was that underneath the colourful bedspread and mismatched hotel-branded pillows, the sheets were too small for the bed. They tucked in fine at the top, but as you eased your legs down, you got a nasty shock when your feet suddenly hit the mattress about 2/3 of the way down. Seriously, they were using double sheets on a king size bed and hoping you wouldn't notice. I did.

I switched on the television immediately, to see what channels I had since my selection in my previous night's hotel had been limited. What's even better than a limited selection? A selection that only consists of fuzzy grey lines on every channel. This was not going to do, so I took some digital photos as evidence (not really knowing the Spanish for "fuzzy grey lines") and marched down to reception to raise the issue. They looked at the photos, agreed the reception was 'poor' and agreed to look at it. I returned to my room and quickly got a phone call saying they had done it, so I switched the set back on, and sure enough the quality on a whole 6 channels had improved. Unfortunately, none of those channels were (a) in English or (b) worth watching, but I felt they had at least tried. Later when I switched rooms (see below) I found that they hadn't tried all that hard, since my new room's television had more than twice the number of channels, including E! which satisfied my need to catch up on celebrity gossip in English, in lieu of a proper news channel.

I also did not feel my room was all that clean, but aside from a half-used soap in the shower left behind by a previous occupant, it was hard to tell whether it was really just badly maintained, rather than properly dirty. There were lines on the floor tiles, for example, but you couldn't see whether these were permanent marks, or would come off if someone bothered to mop the place.

While the room had one thing I wasn't expecting - ashtrays and a distinct smell of smoke - it also lacked a lot of things. The TV did not have a remote control, so you had to sit right next to it to change the channels. Since most still boasted occasionally fuzzy lines, you had to move away to get a better picture and work out what channel it was, and then move back to flip up or down to something better. I struggled to work out the air con, because the knobs had been removed from the unit, but eventually found a switch next to the bed which gave me the basic choice of on (arctic-like temperature soon ensued) or off (clammy feeling and that stale smoke smell soon returned). There was absolutely no information in the room, about the hotel's services, or the pool opening times, or the restaurant or anything. I was provided with two bottles of water, though a note said only one was free, and the other would cost 10 pesos. There were no glasses here or in the bathroom, so it was assumed you would like to drink straight from the bottles. The bathroom included 3 large beige towels, but no bath mat or hand towel, and only enough room on the rail to hang one up to dry at a time, so I stuck the other towels rather unattractively on the chairs in the bedroom when they needed to dry. I did use the lack of hotel information to my advantage though, deciding I could take one of the towels to the beach since they didn't explicitly tell me not to.

I went to investigate the pool, and found it easily, on the first floor. It was a reasonable size, with a few sun loungers and lots of plastic chairs, but a large Mexican family had already taken ownership of the two tables to set up what appeared to be half the contents of the local Oxxo's off licence section. The pool included information about depth, and that you could not swim naked: some locals clearly took this to mean they could wear anything, as long as they wore something, and were swimming in jeans and t-shirts. The info mentioned nothing about alcohol, or glass in the pool area, however, so the aforementioned drinkers were not breaking any rules. There was one obvious problem with the pool: it was surrounded on all four sides by the tall hotel towers, so got little in the way of sunshine. This meant the water was cold all day, and anyone wishing to sunbathe would have to time their visit during the approximately 90 minutes each day when the sun was high enough in the sky to reach down to the pool.

I decided to go to the beach instead, and this was located near the hotel, less than 5 minutes walk away. Also in the area was a small park, and a few convenience stores and food places, but it was mainly a residential part of town. I did find one lovely restaurant though, about 4 blocks away, called Pizza de Marco, which was exactly what I needed that night.

Back in the hotel after my beach trip I braved a shower (powerful, but in a narrow stream, not a nice spray). I was pretty fed up at this point and looking forward to checking out the next morning, but little did I know the fun hadn't even begun. I fell asleep pretty quickly, despite the fun sheet situation, but was awakened about 3am by the people in the next room, whose children had just found the Disney channel. Clearly not everyone was privileged enough to have wavy lined channels. The noise was incredible - I could hear every word that was being said, all the music, the sound effects etc. After 15 minutes of fuming and failing to fall back asleep, I padded barefoot down to reception and asked for another room. This is not something I've ever done before, but the noise was really intolerable and the hotel owed me a good night's sleep at the very least. They gave me a new room at the opposite side of the building with little fuss, and I was accompanied there by a bell boy though I'm not sure why since he didn't even offer to carry my bags.

In the morning, I got to have a good look at my new room, since I'd been half asleep when I'd moved in. It was pretty much the same as my original, though the bottles of water here did not mention a fee, and there was a small posy of plastic flowers in a pound-shop vase on the desk. I also had a view towards the sea, though various buildings stood between me and the waves. I wondered whether this was a "superior" room. Time to check the television, and, lo and behold, it was almost fuzz-free, and boasted extra channels. Quite how their aerials must be set up to allow some rooms a larger channel variety than others remained a mystery to me, but I was just happy to be able to watch the True Hollywood Story of N'Sync in bed.

Having scoped out the local area the night before, I decided to brave the hotel's breakfast buffet. This was not included in the price, but only cost a reasonable 80 pesos. The menu had been posted in the lift the night before, and I'd identified more than a few things I could eat, so it seemed like a sensible bet. Unfortunately, the menu was either out of date or inaccurate, and some of the things they advertised were not available. The selection was still ok: bread and a lovely chocolate cake, yoghurt, cereals and lots of fresh fruits, and a cooked selection including among other things beans, eggs and pancakes with two types of maple syrup, but the presentation, complete with big silver trays, was more school canteen than gourmet restaurant, and I wanted to get out of there quite quickly.

Check out was at 1pm, so I spent the morning on the beach, brought a nice mound of sand back to my new room with me, had another shower and then left. They hotel even failed on my last request - that they call me a taxi - and said I should "wait on the corner" and one would eventually drive by.

I paid £38 for my fun night here (room-only), booking in advance through GTA Hotels, since Veracruz is not a popular destination for foreign tourists, and is not listed on many sites. In my opinion, I paid about £30 too much.

I was disappointed with my stay in this hotel, not because I paid a lot, but because I still believe a star rating should mean something. There is no place on Earth where the facilities or customer service offered by this hotel would qualify it as a 4 star establishment. One to avoid.


http://www.hotelacuario.com/

Summary: Never again