Hotel Siroco, Benalmedina (Hotels in Costa del Sol)

Member Name: Dave Robinson

Product:	Hotels in Costa del Sol
Date:	16/11/00 (2248 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Wide choice of food, very clean, friendly staff, spacious, not too big, two pools, good views over the Mediterranean, good location (more about this in my future review of the Costa Del Sol!)

Disadvantages: Quality of food poor

Two weeks ago, I returned home from a week in sunny Spain, or to be more precise, the Costa Del Sol (look out for my review of this soon!). My family and I stayed in the Hotel Siroco, in the town of Benalmedina, and here follows my review of this hotel.

The hotel has four storeys, so it is not too big compared to other hotels tailored for package holidays in Spain, but is nevertheless very spacious. The corridors are a good width, the foyer area is large, with a reception, lots of comfortable setees and chairs to sit on, a large bar, well furnished and decorated cabaret room, a shop and left-luggage lockers. As you enter, there are two small (we found they only fit about four people) lifts on your left.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the room was how clean and tidy it was. I could tell that at this hotel they really make an effort to clean the rooms thoroughly. A neat little touch was the special polythene wrap around the toilet seat, which had something like "Freshly sanitised" printed on it, and you had to remove it before you could use the toilet. The bathroom had a toilet, shower, bath, bidet and sink. There were plenty of fresh white towels, as well as soap, shower gel and shower caps. The bathroom was fresh, clean, and reasonably modern. The room had three beds, which were very comfy indeed. There was an excellent TV, brand new, with fastext, which had around 12 channels (the only two English ones were Sky News and BBC World, however). There was a very nice balcony, with a great view overlooking both the hotel's two pools and the Mediterranean Sea! Excellent!

There were two pools ajoining one another at the hotel, surrounded by plenty of deckchairs. Although I didn't go in the pools, they looked very clean and attractive, and my mum + dad went in and said that the water was "freezing" at first, but after a while they got used to it. There was also a table tennis table, which was
free to use.

The restaurant was clean (as with everything else in the hotel), and large. The meals were always buffet-style, you just helped yourself to whatever you fancied. Our package was a half-board deal, so we had breakfast and tea included, but they served dinner/lunch as well. The standard of the food tended to vary according to what you chose, they chips were always rather cold so they weren't very nice, but there was often some unusual delicacies such as squid and veal. There was a *very* wide selection of fresh fruit, my favourite was the mouth-watering melon, which I always had two pieces of for starters! Again, there were some unusual fruits that you would not find in Britain. There were also drinks machimes for fruit juices and hot drinks, such as Tea, Coffee, Hot Chocolate and Cappucino. At breakfast time, there was only two cereals to choose from, they were cornflakes and sugar puffs, which I thought was a bit limited, but there was a lot of other things to make up for it, such as crossaints, pain-au-chocolat, apple pastries, lots of hot items such as fried, boiled, poached and scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages etc.

One of the best things about the hotel was the fact that it was so cosmopolitan. We met people from Germany, France, Holland, Spain, America and the UK who were holidaying there! The staff were all Spanish, and they were very friendly and helpful. Overall, an excellent hotel, but not perfect, mainly due to the standard of some of the food.

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