In September 2010 went with my daughter to rest in Bulgaria, stayed at the hotel Dolphin-Marina. Chose this hotel by accident. I gave the documents for registration to the travel agency and only before the departure I bothered to read the reviews about this hotel. The reviews, to be honest, did not inspire, but it was too late to change anything.
In the end, everything turned out to be not so scary, but the hotel has obvious shortcomings. The question is how you will react to them: if the main thing for you is a vacation at sea, then you can survive them, but if you attach great importance to the service, then you will probably experience a lot of negative emotions that can ruin your vacation. I initially tuned in to the fact that the main thing for my daughter and me is to enjoy the sea, and everything else is secondary. Maybe that's why my overall impression is generally positive, but, to be honest, next time I most likely won't go there, because. for the money spent you want better and more : -). So, in order.
Location.
The hotel is located almost close to the sea (sometimes it seemed to me that it was too close). From the building to the sea - no more than 40 meters. Directly in front of the hotel is something like a pier for the local pleasure boats. You can’t call such a landscape especially pleasant, but it doesn’t cause any disgust either. The hotel does not have its own beach. Directly in front of the hotel there is a swimming pool and sun loungers with umbrellas around it (this can be clearly seen in the photographs). You can go to the beach to the Rubin Hotel (this is to the right of the Dolphin Marina Hotel, if you are facing the sea) - you can use the sun loungers there for free, because. Rubin and Dolphin Marina are part of the same hotel chain. The distance from the beach to the Dolphin Marina hotel is about 50-70 meters, that is, very close. My daughter and I did not feel any inconvenience from walking to the beach.
Beach.
Now for the beach. The beach, frankly, is small. It is probably 50 meters long. It is not very suitable for bathing children (3-6 years old): it gets deep quite quickly for them, because. the bottom goes down relatively quickly. This becomes especially clear when the waves are large: at that time they have to be content with only the very edge of the coast (although at this time they have another entertainment - how to catch a wave so that it rolls and drags a little along the sand). I can’t say that the sea is somehow very dirty in this place, but I was very alarmed by the flow of water of unknown origin into the sea from a pipe built into concrete near the beach. The sand is dirty: there are cigarette butts, plastic. For 7 days, I only saw a cleaner once (although it is quite possible that the beach was cleaned in the morning when we were not on the beach). There is a bar near the beach, people from there constantly carried drinks. I was not there, so I can’t say anything definite about the bar service. In general, the beach pulls on C grade. I would like the best.
Number.
Acquaintance with the number begins with the door, right? Before the trip, I read how "charm" magnetic room locks are. I had to personally verify the veracity of the complaints about this: for the very first time, I probably stood for 10 minutes and tried to open the lock, once again swiping the issued card. Nothing worked. Even wanted to go to the reception to swear about it. But an elderly employee of the hotel approached me, passing by, and she opened the room the second time. In fact, it's not all that scary: it takes some skill to open this lock, and in the following days, in most cases, I opened the lock on the first try. The room is large, spacious, with a balcony, with panoramic windows. Perhaps these are all his virtues. The devil is in the details, is that what they say? The room was repaired, repainted, but of poor quality: dark spots are visible where they putty. The furniture is not new: one coat hook was missing, one bed was repaired, which was noticeable by the protruding sharp end of the screw, which, if careless, could injure the leg. Bed. Oh, the bed is something! Terribly creaky. How to be married couples in a fit of passion is not clear. Is it possible to buy earplugs for the neighbors in advance so that they do not suffer from excessive noise at night and in the evenings (by the way, the soundproofing in the rooms is rather poor). The sheet did not fit the width of the bed: due to the fact that it was impossible to make it properly, it constantly wrinkled at night, which for me was just flour, and every night for me was a struggle with the sheet. The blanket is thin, which is probably justified in the summer, but in the fall it was chilly at night, we had to additionally cover ourselves with a bedspread.
The room has a small TV. How many channels are there - I did not understand, because. I didn't have the patience to read. I settled on the Euronews channel (button 5), from which I learned the news, and on the Russian-language channel History (button 6).
There is a small safe inside the cabinet (measuring 25 by 15 centimeters, A4 sheet is included only folded). As we were explained, the hotel is not responsible for the loss of valuables if they disappear from the room, so everything of value had to be locked in a safe (it is not clear, however, how to prove that the stolen was in a safe in case of theft... ). I did not record cases of hacking our number : -), but I still used the safe.
The bathroom (combined with a toilet) makes, in general, a pleasant impression: large, bright, with a huge countertop made of beautiful natural beige stone. But there are small annoyances. The door lock jammed, because of which one late evening (when my daughter was already sleeping) I could not leave the toilet. Imagine, already washed, thoughts already in bed, and then such an incident. Of course, I could call the reception and ask for help (that's when I realized why the second telephone is in the bathroom : -)), but in this case 1) I will wake up my daughter, who can be frightened of noise when she wakes up, 2 ) it is somehow undignified for a Russian person to give up in front of household trifles. I looked around in the bathroom, wondering what could help me open this ill-fated lock. And I saw a brush. I took advantage of it, wielding it like a lever (the main thing here is to make an effort in the right place). In general, after ten minutes of fighting with the castle, he succumbed, and I was released : -). After that incident, I did not use the lock, but simply warned my daughter that I was going to the toilet (I wanted to tell the hotel staff about this all the time and forgot all the time : -); as a result, upon arrival home, I specifically phoned the reception and warned that the castle should be repaired before accommodating new tourists).
Another nuisance. There are railings built into the wall next to the bathtub, which you can hold on to while rising out of the bathtub, or, conversely, falling into it. So, these railings were fastened with rusty screws that barely held them. Holding on to such railings is life-threatening.
The room is equipped with air conditioning (as far as I understand, there is something like central ventilation), the control unit of which is located in the room. Once I tried to regulate the temperature, but I did not succeed. As a result, he consistently supplied cool air of the same temperature, which, however, suited me.
Electric sockets in the room are ordinary, ours, Soviet ones. You will not have problems with recharging phones or other equipment.
About the number, it seems, that's all, but it's worth mentioning our smaller brothers. For some reason, I used to think that there could be no mosquitoes near the sea. It wasn’t there: they might be there, the striped devils. Although there was only one case. But I am a thrifty person, I took an electric fumigator with me, which I put on for the night (I read reviews before leaving, I read that some midges had bitten someone there, so I took it with me). Therefore, we had no problems with mosquitoes. For some reason, ants lived on the balcony, their house was somewhere in the cracks of the walls. True, they did not interfere with us: they crawled along the window, went about their business, did not crawl into the room. We experienced the most negative emotions when some local creature crawled into our room in the evening. We just entered the room, and with peripheral vision I noticed that something, the size of a cockroach, quickly crawled out from under the front door to the room. My daughter also noticed later, she told me: “Dad, some kind of mouse ran into us. ” I took the slate and went to look for her. She (it? ) ended up under the bench (funny, by the way, bench, somewhat reminiscent of benches in kindergarten): a long, flat abdomen, with many legs on each side (I think, 6-8 pieces on each side), with long mustaches. In length - one and a half to two red cockroaches. In general, an unattractive creature. She runs fast, but still, compared to our cunning red cockroaches, she is kind of slow: I slapped her pretty quickly. That day I went to bed with a bad feeling. History repeated itself two days later. I then specifically photographed this creature in macro mode (or rather, what was left of it). Then he showed at the reception to explain to me what it was, but they themselves were not aware, they only wrote down the number of our room. My personal guess is street insects that, due to a misunderstanding, crawled into our room. True, why in our room? We lived on the second floor. It turns out that they climbed the elevator or the stairs and crawled up to us on purpose... There is also a suspicion that we brought them on ourselves, because. several times we roamed around the hotel and walked on the local grass, in which these centipedes (as my daughter and I called them) could live.
Room cleaning.
Well, that's not the hotel's strong point, to say the least. I could not figure out how the towels are changed. At one time everything was completely replaced, at another time it was selectively changed, at other times nothing was changed. Rubbish, however, was always taken out. They cannot do wet cleaning. The room was cleaned with me, so the employee spent a couple of times with a wet rag in the middle of the room, and didn’t even touch it between the beds. Sometimes I noticed that the garbage had been taken out, the towels had been changed, and the wet cleaning had not been done. In general, a complete mess in this regard. One could, of course, quarrel about this. But he did not spoil his mood.
By the way, here is a detail. If you, like me, managed to choose this hotel, then take a brush for clothes with you. It is convenient for her to collect / sweep sand from tiles (there the entire floor is covered with tiles). Anyway, you will not call the cleaners every time, and after the beach you will probably bring sand with you. It’s unpleasant to walk on it, it’s easier to sweep it (at least to the side, sweep it into a corner).
Reception staff.
There were no language problems with the reception staff. At the very least, someone is better, someone is worse, but they all understand Russian there and speak Russian (by the way, not at all because the languages are from the same language group: I assure you that there are many differences in languages, and if you can read individual sentences, this does not mean at all that it will always be so (I bought a book in Bulgarian - I was personally convinced of this: the percentage of reading comprehension tends to 1%), but I generally keep quiet about oral speech: for an untrained ear, Bulgarian speech sounds like gibberish; but I still liked the language, it reminds me of Old Slavonic). The hotel staff are quite polite people, I did not notice any prejudice, although no one will spread out in courtesies there.
Dining room.
Big, light. This is a plus : -). Places, in general, were always enough. It has never happened that my daughter and I did not find a free table. BUT. The table is served (napkin, fork and knife) only once when the dining room is opened. Accordingly, if you came and sat down at the table at which you had already eaten, you will have to take a fork and a napkin yourself. But these are trifles. They still have problems with the kitchen. They cook qualitatively, but somehow it is very monotonous. For some reason, there are few cereals (and if there are, then they are necessarily sweet). Sometimes some kind of white sweetish sauce is added to the side dish and other dishes, which discourages taking it. Always eat fresh vegetables: carrots, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes. There have always been fruits too: apples, plums, watermelon, peaches, nectarines, grapes. But the watermelon and peaches were tasteless. For dinner and lunch they serve delicious cakes, which I am addicted to. You can treat yourself to dry Bulgarian wine. I preferred dry white. One glass for lunch and dinner - great! We did not leave the dining room hungry, but still there was a feeling that something was missing...
Swimming pool.
I liked the pool, long, relatively spacious. Clean, pleasant water.
Vacationers.
As far as I understand, the composition of tourists is constantly changing. It is possible that it depends on the season. When we started to rest, there were many Bulgarians and Germans, there were not very many Russians. But then a couple of days later a lot of Russians arrived, and it seems to me that ours were the most : -). Lots of couples, including older ones. There are also young people, but not many. Everyone was quite intelligent, there were never any conflicts.
Summary.
If you still have the opportunity to choose, then I advise you to look for a better hotel. In my opinion, for the price they ask, the service should be an order of magnitude higher.
If you have already bought a ticket and you have no way back, then pay attention to the strengths of the hotel. When will you hear the sound of the sea surf again, especially on days when it is stormy? It's wonderful music, I assure you. Lying at night and listening to the sound of the sea is very soothing. And the seagulls that sometimes fly so close that it seems you can reach them with your hand? What about their screams in the morning? The hotel, located in the depths of the resort, clearly does not have such advantages. So, not everything is so bad if you think about it : -).
In the end, everything turned out to be not so scary, but the hotel has obvious shortcomings. The question is how you will react to them: if the main thing for you is a vacation at sea, then you can survive them, but if you attach great importance to the service, then you will probably experience a lot of negative emotions that can ruin your vacation. I initially tuned in to the fact that the main thing for my daughter and me is to enjoy the sea, and everything else is secondary. Maybe that's why my overall impression is generally positive, but, to be honest, next time I most likely won't go there, because. for the money spent you want better and more : -). So, in order.
Location.
The hotel is located almost close to the sea (sometimes it seemed to me that it was too close). From the building to the sea - no more than 40 meters. Directly in front of the hotel is something like a pier for the local pleasure boats. You can’t call such a landscape especially pleasant, but it doesn’t cause any disgust either. The hotel does not have its own beach. Directly in front of the hotel there is a swimming pool and sun loungers with umbrellas around it (this can be clearly seen in the photographs). You can go to the beach to the Rubin Hotel (this is to the right of the Dolphin Marina Hotel, if you are facing the sea) - you can use the sun loungers there for free, because. Rubin and Dolphin Marina are part of the same hotel chain. The distance from the beach to the Dolphin Marina hotel is about 50-70 meters, that is, very close. My daughter and I did not feel any inconvenience from walking to the beach.
Beach.
Now for the beach. The beach, frankly, is small. It is probably 50 meters long. It is not very suitable for bathing children (3-6 years old): it gets deep quite quickly for them, because. the bottom goes down relatively quickly. This becomes especially clear when the waves are large: at that time they have to be content with only the very edge of the coast (although at this time they have another entertainment - how to catch a wave so that it rolls and drags a little along the sand). I can’t say that the sea is somehow very dirty in this place, but I was very alarmed by the flow of water of unknown origin into the sea from a pipe built into concrete near the beach. The sand is dirty: there are cigarette butts, plastic. For 7 days, I only saw a cleaner once (although it is quite possible that the beach was cleaned in the morning when we were not on the beach). There is a bar near the beach, people from there constantly carried drinks. I was not there, so I can’t say anything definite about the bar service. In general, the beach pulls on C grade. I would like the best.
Number.
Acquaintance with the number begins with the door, right? Before the trip, I read how "charm" magnetic room locks are. I had to personally verify the veracity of the complaints about this: for the very first time, I probably stood for 10 minutes and tried to open the lock, once again swiping the issued card. Nothing worked. Even wanted to go to the reception to swear about it. But an elderly employee of the hotel approached me, passing by, and she opened the room the second time. In fact, it's not all that scary: it takes some skill to open this lock, and in the following days, in most cases, I opened the lock on the first try. The room is large, spacious, with a balcony, with panoramic windows. Perhaps these are all his virtues. The devil is in the details, is that what they say? The room was repaired, repainted, but of poor quality: dark spots are visible where they putty. The furniture is not new: one coat hook was missing, one bed was repaired, which was noticeable by the protruding sharp end of the screw, which, if careless, could injure the leg. Bed. Oh, the bed is something! Terribly creaky. How to be married couples in a fit of passion is not clear. Is it possible to buy earplugs for the neighbors in advance so that they do not suffer from excessive noise at night and in the evenings (by the way, the soundproofing in the rooms is rather poor). The sheet did not fit the width of the bed: due to the fact that it was impossible to make it properly, it constantly wrinkled at night, which for me was just flour, and every night for me was a struggle with the sheet. The blanket is thin, which is probably justified in the summer, but in the fall it was chilly at night, we had to additionally cover ourselves with a bedspread.
The room has a small TV. How many channels are there - I did not understand, because. I didn't have the patience to read. I settled on the Euronews channel (button 5), from which I learned the news, and on the Russian-language channel History (button 6).
There is a small safe inside the cabinet (measuring 25 by 15 centimeters, A4 sheet is included only folded). As we were explained, the hotel is not responsible for the loss of valuables if they disappear from the room, so everything of value had to be locked in a safe (it is not clear, however, how to prove that the stolen was in a safe in case of theft... ). I did not record cases of hacking our number : -), but I still used the safe.
The bathroom (combined with a toilet) makes, in general, a pleasant impression: large, bright, with a huge countertop made of beautiful natural beige stone. But there are small annoyances. The door lock jammed, because of which one late evening (when my daughter was already sleeping) I could not leave the toilet. Imagine, already washed, thoughts already in bed, and then such an incident. Of course, I could call the reception and ask for help (that's when I realized why the second telephone is in the bathroom : -)), but in this case 1) I will wake up my daughter, who can be frightened of noise when she wakes up, 2 ) it is somehow undignified for a Russian person to give up in front of household trifles. I looked around in the bathroom, wondering what could help me open this ill-fated lock. And I saw a brush. I took advantage of it, wielding it like a lever (the main thing here is to make an effort in the right place). In general, after ten minutes of fighting with the castle, he succumbed, and I was released : -). After that incident, I did not use the lock, but simply warned my daughter that I was going to the toilet (I wanted to tell the hotel staff about this all the time and forgot all the time : -); as a result, upon arrival home, I specifically phoned the reception and warned that the castle should be repaired before accommodating new tourists).
Another nuisance. There are railings built into the wall next to the bathtub, which you can hold on to while rising out of the bathtub, or, conversely, falling into it. So, these railings were fastened with rusty screws that barely held them. Holding on to such railings is life-threatening.
The room is equipped with air conditioning (as far as I understand, there is something like central ventilation), the control unit of which is located in the room. Once I tried to regulate the temperature, but I did not succeed. As a result, he consistently supplied cool air of the same temperature, which, however, suited me.
Electric sockets in the room are ordinary, ours, Soviet ones. You will not have problems with recharging phones or other equipment.
About the number, it seems, that's all, but it's worth mentioning our smaller brothers. For some reason, I used to think that there could be no mosquitoes near the sea. It wasn’t there: they might be there, the striped devils. Although there was only one case. But I am a thrifty person, I took an electric fumigator with me, which I put on for the night (I read reviews before leaving, I read that some midges had bitten someone there, so I took it with me). Therefore, we had no problems with mosquitoes. For some reason, ants lived on the balcony, their house was somewhere in the cracks of the walls. True, they did not interfere with us: they crawled along the window, went about their business, did not crawl into the room. We experienced the most negative emotions when some local creature crawled into our room in the evening. We just entered the room, and with peripheral vision I noticed that something, the size of a cockroach, quickly crawled out from under the front door to the room. My daughter also noticed later, she told me: “Dad, some kind of mouse ran into us. ” I took the slate and went to look for her. She (it? ) ended up under the bench (funny, by the way, bench, somewhat reminiscent of benches in kindergarten): a long, flat abdomen, with many legs on each side (I think, 6-8 pieces on each side), with long mustaches. In length - one and a half to two red cockroaches. In general, an unattractive creature. She runs fast, but still, compared to our cunning red cockroaches, she is kind of slow: I slapped her pretty quickly. That day I went to bed with a bad feeling. History repeated itself two days later. I then specifically photographed this creature in macro mode (or rather, what was left of it). Then he showed at the reception to explain to me what it was, but they themselves were not aware, they only wrote down the number of our room. My personal guess is street insects that, due to a misunderstanding, crawled into our room. True, why in our room? We lived on the second floor. It turns out that they climbed the elevator or the stairs and crawled up to us on purpose... There is also a suspicion that we brought them on ourselves, because. several times we roamed around the hotel and walked on the local grass, in which these centipedes (as my daughter and I called them) could live.
Room cleaning.
Well, that's not the hotel's strong point, to say the least. I could not figure out how the towels are changed. At one time everything was completely replaced, at another time it was selectively changed, at other times nothing was changed. Rubbish, however, was always taken out. They cannot do wet cleaning. The room was cleaned with me, so the employee spent a couple of times with a wet rag in the middle of the room, and didn’t even touch it between the beds. Sometimes I noticed that the garbage had been taken out, the towels had been changed, and the wet cleaning had not been done. In general, a complete mess in this regard. One could, of course, quarrel about this. But he did not spoil his mood.
By the way, here is a detail. If you, like me, managed to choose this hotel, then take a brush for clothes with you. It is convenient for her to collect / sweep sand from tiles (there the entire floor is covered with tiles). Anyway, you will not call the cleaners every time, and after the beach you will probably bring sand with you. It’s unpleasant to walk on it, it’s easier to sweep it (at least to the side, sweep it into a corner).
Reception staff.
There were no language problems with the reception staff. At the very least, someone is better, someone is worse, but they all understand Russian there and speak Russian (by the way, not at all because the languages are from the same language group: I assure you that there are many differences in languages, and if you can read individual sentences, this does not mean at all that it will always be so (I bought a book in Bulgarian - I was personally convinced of this: the percentage of reading comprehension tends to 1%), but I generally keep quiet about oral speech: for an untrained ear, Bulgarian speech sounds like gibberish; but I still liked the language, it reminds me of Old Slavonic). The hotel staff are quite polite people, I did not notice any prejudice, although no one will spread out in courtesies there.
Dining room.
Big, light. This is a plus : -). Places, in general, were always enough. It has never happened that my daughter and I did not find a free table. BUT. The table is served (napkin, fork and knife) only once when the dining room is opened. Accordingly, if you came and sat down at the table at which you had already eaten, you will have to take a fork and a napkin yourself. But these are trifles. They still have problems with the kitchen. They cook qualitatively, but somehow it is very monotonous. For some reason, there are few cereals (and if there are, then they are necessarily sweet). Sometimes some kind of white sweetish sauce is added to the side dish and other dishes, which discourages taking it. Always eat fresh vegetables: carrots, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes. There have always been fruits too: apples, plums, watermelon, peaches, nectarines, grapes. But the watermelon and peaches were tasteless. For dinner and lunch they serve delicious cakes, which I am addicted to. You can treat yourself to dry Bulgarian wine. I preferred dry white. One glass for lunch and dinner - great! We did not leave the dining room hungry, but still there was a feeling that something was missing...
Swimming pool.
I liked the pool, long, relatively spacious. Clean, pleasant water.
Vacationers.
As far as I understand, the composition of tourists is constantly changing. It is possible that it depends on the season. When we started to rest, there were many Bulgarians and Germans, there were not very many Russians. But then a couple of days later a lot of Russians arrived, and it seems to me that ours were the most : -). Lots of couples, including older ones. There are also young people, but not many. Everyone was quite intelligent, there were never any conflicts.
Summary.
If you still have the opportunity to choose, then I advise you to look for a better hotel. In my opinion, for the price they ask, the service should be an order of magnitude higher.
If you have already bought a ticket and you have no way back, then pay attention to the strengths of the hotel. When will you hear the sound of the sea surf again, especially on days when it is stormy? It's wonderful music, I assure you. Lying at night and listening to the sound of the sea is very soothing. And the seagulls that sometimes fly so close that it seems you can reach them with your hand? What about their screams in the morning? The hotel, located in the depths of the resort, clearly does not have such advantages. So, not everything is so bad if you think about it : -).
Translated automatically from Russian. View original
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