Falkensteiner Hotel & Spa Iadera — Hotel in Grad Zadar

Unfortunately, this place is far from a 5* experience. The staff is generally friendly, and most of them are trying their best, but so much is just wrong here.

First of all - this place brags about "fine dining" but it only offered a fixed menu with a choice between 2 starters and 3 main courses. The hotel homepage brags about "fine dining", but only mentions in print that restaurants are "open seasonally" - what does it even mean? When is "season"? Sorry, a 5* place should have better culinary offer, especially when it lure its guests by "fine dining" choices. There was no choice here.

Then the room. How can there be no power outlets in the room? Yes, there is one outlet on the floor, right next to the door, and yes, there are two outlets at the wash basin. But nothing next to bed where I could for example want to both charge and use my phone. I couldn't use my laptop at the desk, because I had no place to plug it in. This is 2024, people are travelling with two, three devices a person. The bathtub is right next to the bed. You can't see half the TV screen while in the bed (because it's positioned on a very low cabinet, with a couch in between the bed and the TV). The TV is a modern smart TV, but the hotel disabled Netflix on it (and this TV does support it - only when you try to access it, it say that it's disabled). The WiFi is either too slow, or not working at all, there are places in the hotel where it is just not accessible. There are no body-sized towels - the only towels we had in our room were hand/face towels. How can a 5* hotel do all this?

The restaurant provides no privacy. The tables are positioned so close to one another, that if you are a couple, you are sitting right next to another couple almost as if it was a table for 4. You can't even have a decent private chat without feeling like everybody can hear you. Funny enough - they could arrange the tables to give you more privacy, they just choose not to. On our second morning, the restaurant was full at breakfast, we thought we were lucky to find a free table (with 0 privacy, mind you!), but when another couple arrived, they opened up another section of the restaurant which was completely readied, just intentionally not made available until the very last moment. Come on! I would expect this from a cheap diner, not the only restaurant in a 5* hotel!

If you have an electric car, please avoid this place. They have a grand total of 3 chargers - one of which doesn't work. One charger was constantly occupied by a car that never moved during our entire stay! The night before the departure we ask the valet to charge our car, and he promises to do that, but when I wake up at 6AM I see that my car isn't charged at all and that there is a charging error. I walk down to reception, and receptionist tells me that "we have problems with that charger" - well, I asked for my car to be charged, not plugged in! I have no use for my car being plugged into a charger that the hotel knows is faulty! Thankfully there is a third charger (away in the garage, but apparently it was too far for the valet of the previous night to walk back from, so he simply plugged it into a faulty charger rather than walking to a working one which would require him to spend 2 minutes on foot).

And last - they misrepresent their prices. We booked 2-hour "couple massage" at their Aquapura Spa, by following links from their "welcome" e-mail. This was listed as "couple" treatment, and was listed at 180€. They charged us twice the price, and they said that this was price per person. I showed them that it was a "couple massage" and I showed it to the receptionist by following the whole booking process, step by step, from the welcome mail all the way to confirmation, and it was nowhere mentioned that the price was per person.

This was the last time I stayed at a Falkensteiner. There are many better places to spend my time...

We stayed at Senia premium apts in August 2020, after having a fairly solid stay in 2019. We rented the largest apartment (400 EUR/day) hoping for great accommodation. It ended up as a total disappointment, with us having to fight to get a barely acceptable accommodation.||First things first...there are two type of apartments, those that have private owners (better equipped) and those owned by Falkensteiner (usually dirty and badly maintained). Price is the same, allocation is matter of luck. We had to fight to get the one from the private owner. Anyway, in the end we shortened our stay for one week and left for another accommodation.||Good:|Great location, Punta Skala is really nice and views from the apts are great. View from largest apartments is amazing, balcony is great, apts are large, pools are nice. When we complained the receptionist told us to go to Greece if we don’t like it here. Again, 400 EUR/ night. Manager on duty, Lovro, was great, but he cannot work with bad staff. I reckon he will bail out within a year or so, this place is just bad. You are free to treat the place as your own place...you can bring guests, grill on the balcony, bring your own bikes and SUPs. That freedom is cool.|WiFi connectivity is quite solid.|Do use the car cleaning service I resort, guys are awesome, very professional, just settle the price in cash and pay the guys directly (leave tip).||All in all, we’re done with Falkensteiner in Croatia, be it Senia, Iadera or Diadora. It’s the same management, same crew. I’ll continue staying with Falkensteiner in Austria and Italy and keep my gold status, but their ops in Croatia need a proper reboot before we spend more money with them.|I am particularly angry since we like the location, have friends coming there and generally enjoyed our stay. However, I am not shelling out 8-10 kEUR for a vacation where I have to negotiate cleaning quality, fight with a dude trying to charge me 5 EUR for shooting hoops and buy 200 EUR of cleaning gear to get my apartment ready for use. No way!||Bad:|Cleaning service is really bad, this is not 5-star service. Apts are dirty, once cleaned they are still dirty. If you’re lucky to get the apt with a private owner you might be lucky. Buildings are showing age and maintenance is spotty. Sandy beach below apts is not private and there is no service. Majority of people on the beach are locals and they take the sunbeds reserved for Falkensteiner. Generally, everything outside of the hotel/apt fence is not well maintained. This place has so much potential and bad management/maintenance is simply killing it. It is really sad.|Local resort restaurant, Bracera, has great location but prices are outrageous, 20-30% higher than best restaurants in Zadar. Also, good is passable at best. Views are amazing though.||Ugly:|They will try to charge for everything. 9.5 EUR/day for parking, 5 EUR/h for playing basketball (yeah, no kidding, it’s not even a proper basketball court). I mean, of course we should pay for playing mini-golf or tennis, but shooting hoops? Common!|Receptionists in Senia are generally nice, but unless you get Lovro (manager) or few senior people, you’ll...

This is a difficult hotel to review, because some parts of my experience were nice, and other parts were quite disappointing. I was a guest here for ten days. It was one of the most expensive hotels in the region, so I expected a lot. The grounds of the hotel, including the gardens, were quite beautiful and well maintained. The swimming pools were also very nice, and the views from the communal areas (and also from our room) were awesome.

There are some lovely, charismatic staff members and it was great to get to know them. The breakfast served each morning was high-quality, and there was always a great selection of different foods, juices, teas/coffees and fruits in the mornings.

The room itself was quite dated and tired. It badly needs renovation. I do not expect to pay the five star prices for early 2000’s style furniture and design. All of the furniture was very well used and needed replacing. We had to be moved rooms actually, because the bath in the first room just didn’t work any more.

All of the ‘extras’ were really quite expensive. This includes the spa/massages, food, drink and excursions. For example, my own drinks bill/fee (for me personally - one person) was over £900 for the time I spent here. I had a couple of drinks each day. Maybe 8 cocktails on one day, at the highest, or only 1 or 2 on the lowest day. I never got drunk or even tipsy. But overall my own drinks bill was over £900 which I thought was extraordinary and shocking.

Clearly they try to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out of British, German and American tourists (& others, no doubt) because I can’t imagine local people being persuaded to pay these prices.

Overall you do get the feeling that they want to make as big a profit out of you as possible, by not showing you prices when you order and by always encouraging you to order more of something.

In the spa, I spent over £600 on two massages. To be fair, one was a couples massage, the other was only for me. Again, these are prices that I think are at the very top-end of what you would even expect to pay in the UK. For Croatia, surely these are extraordinary prices.

The food is good, especially the restaurants by the lake, but quite expensive. You can see that staff have been trained to try and get you to pay the most amount of money possible, and every item is priced as high as possible without it being an actual joke.

I do think that there are places which can justify charging these price levels for spa, drinks and food, but Falkensteiner is not of five star quality and so they cannot reasonably charge it. The whole hotel needs renovated, staff should be more attentive (if they want to charge these fees) and there should be more services.

I have been to many five star hotels in my life, but Falkensteiner is the only one where I left thinking that I had been a little bit scammed. It is not five star quality (though it is nice) but they do charge five star prices wherever they possibly can.

Unless the hotel were significantly altered /renovated, I would not return. It actually made me feel that I have been treated as a cash machine for ten days, so I would not be...