Cabogata Garden Hotel and Spa

“ Second visit to this resort and hotel. Retamar is principally a second home area for the Spanish. It is well laid out, beautifully kept and a world away from more traditional Spanish tourist resorts. The Cabogata Hotel is one of five 4 star hotels in the resort. Well designed, modern hotel with traditional Spanish cuisine, several bars and pools. Only the gym is a little too small and the equipment a bit "tired."

Overall though, very welcoming and accommodating and good value. Hence our second visit.

“ Top Tip: The 30 route bus to Almeria provides an interesting, inexpensive day trip from the resort.

“ It's a nice hotel with the room with balcony and the view to the pool and the sea at a distance. The staff were nice but unfortunately only one of them spoke English. The food was great, but it less variety between days. The hotel seemed to cater more for locals/Spanish, German, and French.

“ Top Tip: Not much going on outside the hotel. I would recommend renting a car.

“ If you are looking for a genuine 4* hotel, DO NOT STAY HERE. This hotel did not act like one! I have rated it badly because of their lack of customer service. During our stay we had a problem with a large group of spanish teenage school children (about 40 of them) that arrived the same day as us. This group was totally unsupervised by their teachers and were partying well into the early hours of the morning playing loud music, shouting at the tops of their voices and running between each others rooms. At 3am, having had no sleep yet, I finally went to reception to complain, and only then did the receptionist phone the teacher (who had been located at the opposite end of the hotel) to intervene. When we complained about the noise the next morning, the duty manager told us it was not the hotel's problem if we had an issue with other guests, and they had no responsibility to ensure we were not disturbed by the teenagers, but we should have taken it up with the students ourselves! For this reason I would not recommend this hotel. Customer care rating was zero! They were only interested in taking our money, but had no interest in sorting out any issues that were causing us a problem.

Apart from that problem, I felt that previous reviews about the good food were overstated. It was bog standard buffet food, not that inspiring.
Also, don't be tempted to have a beauty treatment at the Spa! Our daughter had a leg wax and when she came back had to shave her legs again. She said she didn't think the lady had a clue what she was doing, and it certainly wasn't effective!

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“ Top Tip: great beach bar at the far east end