Armas Bella Sun Hotel 4*

DO NOT USE THIS HOTEL IF YOU NEED INTERNET OF ANY KIND.

Today, when selecting a hotel, you select one that has good service. This hotel has this. It has 3 food halls and the food selection is very good. It has 3 swimming pools and water slides. The distance to the beach is only about 150 Meters.

The nice sandy beach is pleasant to walk on, although it is fine grain sand and not the normal sand that I would expect at a sandy beach.

They have a bar near the beach with a toilet, change room and a place to wash your feet on the way back to the hotel, which is very convenient. There is a shower about 20 meters further down the beach walkway specifically for this hotel.

The housecleaning staff clean the rooms almost every day.

The waiting staff are very quick to clean up after guests and are constantly present.

There is even a children’s dining area, which makes a fourth dining hall.

During meal times, the bar staff even give bottles of Pomegranate juice.

The entertainment staff were good and very professional. There is entertainment for the children every evening at 8:30

The staff are pleasant to the guests and children at almost all times.

The gardens of the hotel are very green and well looked after, although the water fountains should be cleaned a lot more often as the look dirty with green moss growing everywhere.

Now for the negatives.

This hotel is built on a slope, with the reception at the top of the slope.

They tried to issue us with a room in the second block on the ground floor with a nice balcony view of a concrete reinforcement wall for the reception block. Nice. The room smelt of mold too. We went back to reception and asked for another room. They issued it in the third block on the top floor. The view was very nice. We didn't really want a top floor room because we knew it would be VERY hot from the hear coming from the roof. When we asked for a room not on the top floor, they started to get upset and asked the travel assistant to manage the problem. In the end, we accepted the room.

We found very quickly that the air conditioners in this room, I can't say for all, was a complete piece of rubbish. It blew air only slightly cooler than the current room temperature. When we asked maintenance to look at it, he came to the room and turned it on, said wait a few minutes and it will blow cool air, and he quickly left. I think he knew it didn't work properly. Nothing more was done. We were left with a HOT room that only got cool at night.

At the sandy beach, about 30 meters from shore, walking distance, with the water up to your neck, there is a BIG coral reef stretching the whole shoreline.

Furthermore there smaller reefs between it and the shore, and a lot of rubbish too.

The beach chairs for the hotel are dirty, old and some even broken as though they are never maintained or replaced. However I did see someone repairing them for the next hotel over.

The hotel outright LIES about free Wi-Fi.

It works only 5 meters from the reception desk. I don't call that free internet.

They provide it with such a small bandwidth that it is not useable.

When we arrived, I was SHOCKED to see 20 guests sitting across from the reception desk with their phones and tablets in order to get access. With that level of usage on so small a channel, made it useless for all. Furthermore, when one person came to ask why they couldn't connect to the internet, the staff simply rebooted the router which sits on the desk, which of course breaks the internet for ALL the users sitting across from the desk. It even breaks it for the PAID users.

The new management has specially done this in order to SELL internet access. And they make a lot of money doing this.

They sell access for $1 per hour, $2 per day, or $5 per week. which will get you the faster connection, and it will work as far as the swimming pool, so, they have set the signal strength to medium.

It seems that they have repeaters throughout the hotel too, but they are configured with different access details that it seems only their staff can access. I made the mistake of paying for access for a week, $5, I had an excellent signal in my room. But it refused to connect. But worked perfectly from reception. Which tells me it was rigged that way to generate more income.

I went to reception one morning to exchange some cash and the manager pulled out of his pocket a huge pack of $1 bills, which was obviously the income from internet services.

Oh, and if you don't get to buy your access pass for the internet in the early morning, they tell you that there are no more tickets for access left and you have to wait until tomorrow.

This problem with internet access almost destroyed my internet based business. I rely on the internet to contact my staff to keep appraised of any problems, and there was a huge problem that I couldn't be made aware of. My whole company website was offline for days without me knowing because I couldn't get internet access. I lost thousands of dollars because of this.

If it were not for the internet problems, I'd give this a 4 star rating. But because of how they have falsified this service, it gets 1 star.