Barceló Tambor — Hotel in Paquera

I booked off 3 nights under the cyber Monday discount hoping to have a good experience at a cheap price, it is clear that I was better off paying more for another hotel, here’s the list of issues I had during my stay: • We got a room with an AC unit so old that it barely felt cooler than the outside, it is unacceptable to feel this hot with the AC on and at max, reflects a clear lack of maintenance for the rooms. • Similarly, the room TV did not have the correct remote, meaning that a lot of the TV functions were inaccessible, I brought my own console for entertainment and it was impossible to access inputs with the remote. • The closet had a little drawer container in the inside, however the second drawer was broken if you tried to pull it you would end up with the whole drawer in your hand. • And to top it off, the room phone did not work and could not connect with reception, I walked to the reception to complain and they told me that they would contact maintenance to check it out, this never happened and we had to put up with this during our stay. • Most of the ice machines for the rooms do not work, staff will just tell you to try other floor or other buildings. • The are 2 pools in this whole hotel and both have a 7 PM CLOSING TIME, that is way too early considering other night entertainment options are lacking as they all relate to either families with little kids or people who like dancing and tropical music, that’s it so why closes the pool at the very start of the evening. • The main pool ran way too hot, almost like hot springs which indicates that they don’t cycle the pool water often but rather let it stay and get stale. While the spa side pool while fresh it was very dirty and is clear that the water does not get treated correctly as I found tadpoles living in the water without issue, disgusting. • One of the best features of this type of hotel is the swim up pool bar, guess what is not working, you had to exit the pool and walk to a bar to get a drink. • Speaking of bars, they are way to stingy with the alcohol, whenever you order up a cock tail you will get less than half a shot’s worth of the spirit of choice and I am almost sure that the tab beer did not have any alcohol content at all. • There are only 2 bathrooms one next to the restaurant and one next to the reception, both smell awful and need better cleaning and none of the are close to the pool, so if you are a responsible person or a responsible parent you will have to take a considerable walk in order to use the bathroom if you are using the pool you will have to take a long walk to use and I’m sure a lot of people don’t. • The food on the main restaurant is fairly decent, lunch is fairly underwhelming and you will see basically the same options every day. However, they do offer sit down dinners at a la carte restaurants, while this sounds fancy and appealing it was not, the entrée was buffet style as well as dessert, so the only thing a la carte was the main course, I had BBQ ribs and honestly the food at the regular restaurant was way better. They have 3 a la carte restaurants but have few spots every night so you are force to wake up early if you want to make the appointment, I would recommend avoiding it as it does not add value to the stay and worst of all the hotel has a huge space problem so they turn the snack bar into the Italian restaurant meaning that they are NO OPTIONS for late nigh snacking. • A lot of the staff does not speak English, and they are customer facing, I had to issue but a lot of people trying to request a drink at the bars would get no response in English, this is unacceptable for a tourist resort such as this one. • Finally, and the strand that broke the camel’s back the checkout is at 12 pm which is pretty standard, what is not is that YOU DO NOT HAVE LUNCH, this is completely unacceptable, on every other resort you would get a voucher to have a last lunch before leaving but here they would not give this fairly standard courtesy. Avoid...

This place is well past it's prime. They claim to be a five star luxury resort but they fail miserably pretending to be one. There's very little that I can say about this place that is positive. We experienced a laundry list of unfortunate experienced here. It seems as if there is a defacto "No Apologies" policy here. After speaking to the front desk about multiple issues multiple times, at no point did any staff ever apologize for the inconvenience. Even after confronting the front desk staff half way through our stay about their lack of acknoledgment or concern about the inconveniences we were experiencing with our room, the staff still did not apologize. They seemed very surprised that no one apologized yet did not take that as an opportunity to actually apologize. I had to tell her flat out that this was their opportunity to do just that and she still just stared at me. I then had to say "I want you to say, 'sorry for the inconvenience' ". The only then did they reluctantly say "I'm sorry".

The Awful: We stood in line 45 minutes to check in. Our key cards had to be reprogrammed twice before we could enter our room the first time. And had to have them reprogrammed again during the following days. I witnessed numerous people during our stay with the same problem. The room did not have towels when we checked in and I had to request them 3 different times over a five hour period before they were delivered to our rooms despite them telling us it would only take 5 minutes. And even then we only received Two when we asked for Three (there were three of us staying in the room). The a/c barely worked. Our bathroom sink drain stopper was stuck in the closed position. We found the previous guests wet swim suit and underwear stuffed in the dresser (gross). After 4 days, water stopped coming out of the hot tap. There were breif power outages. All the "all inclusive" cocktails tasted like they were made with watered down alchohal and kool-aid. And this is in a country where fresh squeezed juice is served at even the cheapest road side restaurants. The food at the included buffet was sub par, low quality and disappointing. Untill our stay here I had never had a meal in Costa Rica that I didn't love. Most of the staff spoke very little to no English at all and made ordering something as simple as a Coke at the free bar a challenge. Once I even used my phone to translate "orange juice" into Spanish including a picture of a glass of OJ and the server thought I was asking for an actual orange. All the common area bath rooms we quite grimy and smelled horrible and three out of four of the sinks in the main lobby women's bathroom did not work. Sunscreen is a necessity with the intensity of the sun here so the gift shop charges exorbitant prices for it. My wife attempted to purchase two small bottles and the total rang to $110 US!! I even found a bottle of baby sunscreen for $62 US!!!. Needless to say we didn't purchase it and drove 30 minutes to the nearest grocery store to pick it up for a reasonable price. Yet everything else the gift shop sold was in price ranges you would expect. The ATM wouldn't dispence cash in any denomination, US dollars or Costa Rican Colones. Cell phone reception is shotty at best. WiFi is not included in the "All Inclusive", costs $10 a day and is only available in the...

If this review saves at least one person from experiencing the ‘hotel hell’ we went through here, it will have been worth it. We arrived late last Wednesday, and after a grueling 3 hour drive from Liberia just wanted a clean room and some sleep. As soon as we walked into our room, we foresaw the horrendous service that would be afforded to us all week long. The floors were filthy, with stains all the way along from the door to the balcony, the room was dated, safe didn’t work, the bathroom had what I can only imagine was human excrement smeared on the wall, among other things. The next day, upon going to breakfast, we were met with the longest lines I have EVER seen for a hotel breakfast; this being the 2nd out of 10 or so all-inclusives I’ve been to with so little organization and space that there are lines for the most necessary amenity. Had the food been alright, I would have looked past it, but it was AWFUL. Like could barely hold down anything other than fruit. Yes, that bad. The ‘restaurants’ here are a joke; we tried all three. The sushi ‘chefs’ have no idea what sushi is, and having been to Japan I think a real sushi chef would commit seppuku had they made something so abysmal as what these guys were churning out and calling ‘sushi rolls’. The steakhouse was decent, barring the one hour wait to get your food (they go 4 orders at a time instead of just taking everyone’s orders and getting straight to work); I’d recommend the sirloin as the filet mignon with ‘champignon’ is NOT it. And finally the Italian restaurant was surprisingly a bit good, dare I say even a tad flavorful with dishes like prosciutto pizza (the only meal with actual spices that I had all week). The employees for the most part don’t really want to help you, as you have to go out of your way to ask them for a decent room clean, or for any other assistance you might need, and there is absolutely zero expedience in anything they do (search ‘tico time’ if you’re unfamiliar with how slow things are in CR); checking in at peak times will take hours regardless of whether they have 1 or 5 employees at the desk. 90% of employees speak little to no English in a country that is overwhelmingly visited by Canadians, Americans and other English speakers, making communication yet another barrier to a good experience. The ‘discotheque’ is the steakhouse after hours; and there are no walls, meaning if you’re anywhere on that side of the resort you’ll hear loud banging and music until at least 1am. The ONLY (and I mean only) reason I’m giving this place 2 stars is because the pool area behind the fitness center is genuinely nice, and they keep it clean (seemingly because it’s only supposed to be for spa guests who spend even more money here). Whoever gave this place 5 stars by INTERNATIONAL standards has to be a comedian (ranking this place over 3 stars should be a class C felony); having worked at a 2 star Marriott, I’d bet money we had a nicer hotel, tastier breakfast, and better amenities than this ‘resort’. I’m a Barcelo member, and honestly every Barcelo I’ve stayed at outside of Mexico has been pretty crap, so I wouldn’t recommend them in this region. Be cautious with...