Accommodation good; location overcrowded (Hotel Horizont Resort (Pula, Croatia))

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Hotel Horizont Resort (Pula, Croatia)
Date:	27/05/09 (15 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good rooms in a potentially lovely location; still a fair option for car travellers

Disadvantages: Beaches small and crowded; resort 'amenities' expensive; public transport links not really adequate

We booked a week at the Horizont in June 2008 through one of the online accommodation websites - hotels.com, bookingworld or some such.

It isn't, despite the name, a hotel as such. This is more like a holiday park. Self contained, self-catering accommodation - I suspect of varying qualities - is provided in small apartment / terrace blocks throughout a large site by the sea. The Horizont's setting is one of it's best points. Although the accommodation blocks themselves (being as they are - grey and blocklike) and many concrete-lined access roads serving them aren't too pretty to look at, the complex is sited on a gently sloping sandy / rocky pine covered hillside that juts out on a rounded promontory into the startlingly blue waters of the Adriatic.

It's an all right place for a short break. The apartments are clean and quite nicely kitted out inside, with TV and basic kitchen equipment, also a balcony / terrace with outdoor seating, and the bathroom / showers are nice and fresh (although the windows in the bathroom are small so the floors if they get wet never dry out). Most blocks have at least a partial sea view, and on the holiday complex site the are a couple of cafes / restaurants (of the pizza and chips variety, and not much cop, unfortunately) and a shop (small, with not a great range of fresh produce and pricey!)

My impression is that this holiday park is geared up for people travelling in their owns car from mainland Europe, and this was the main drawback we found with it, as we were relying on bus transport. It has vechicular access throughout - and though the roads in the complex are quite quiet in general, there are teams of holidaymaking youths who insist on zipping round them on ear-splitting scooters at all hours of the day and night, which is noisy and annoying, and of then course with all the roads there is a low but significant risk of encountering car traffic when ever you are walking about. As the 'garden' / landscaped areas between the apartment blocks aren't fenced, letting younger kids out to play isn't really an option. The complex does have a couple of (if memory serves) fenced off small play areas with swings etc. for the kids.

As the site's geared up for people with cars, there isn't a great deal within walking distance of it - it's well outside Pula city centre (which is a few miles away and too far to walk), buses do serve the resort but are fairly infrequent especially later in the day and there are no non-resort shops, so if you're on foot, you're pretty much stuck there as a captive audience. The next resort complex up the coast has a restaurant of its own but it's just as bad as the Horizon't cafes, although quite a nice walk to get there and back.

The beaches are pebbly / rocky, with rocky shelves in some areas that make for good snorkelling. The smaller more sandy beaches (there's only really one such beach nearby) get very crowded during the day with rowdy and aggressive spitting, sun-bathing Euro-youths (probably the same scooter-riding pillocks you hear at night) and are no fun at all; families with kids get relegated to the rockier areas as a result. This is the problem; the resort is so large it's like a ghost town walking around there during the day, but everyone's down at the beach and there's not enough room for them all by half.

So the resort itself is pretty good and offers decent, affordable accomodation in a potentially lovely setting; and I'd probably feel better about it if it'd been easier to get away from in the day (ie if I was travelling by car). The setting is quite nice but is of course ruined by being overcrowded with other people (heaven knows what it's like in really high season) - though even then, if these guy's didn't include a siginificant portion of aggressive young men who insist on behaving like eejits it would still probably be all right. Rating the resort complex itself I'd probably give it three stars as it offers good accommodation and value; but as a holiday location on the whole, or a place that I'd ever want to return to, I'm afraid - well, that this resort features pretty highly on my personal lifetime list of the last places I've been to before to which I'd ever want to return again.

Summary: There must be better places to holiday in Croatia than this