The Surfing Turtle Inn — Hotel in Puerto Rico

We stayed here for 5 nights at the beginning of February. We paid over $250 per night to stay in the Deluxe King Suite and were expecting a quality of stay that matched the price we were paying. Instead, we ended up with an experience that was more akin to staying in a backpacker hostel, and a poor one at that.||When I booked the stay there were relatively few reviews of this place on TripAdvisor and most of those were old, but were mostly positive. I also checked out some reviews on Booking.Com and they seemed mostly positive but were again from some time ago. After I had booked and just before we checked in, a couple of very negative reviews appeared on TripAdvisor but we approached our stay with an open mind.||Rather than give chapter and verse here are the pros and cons of our stay:||Pros:|- the deluxe king suite is a nicely configured room with ample space||Cons:|- the room was clean but not well maintained with chips on the furniture and old coffee stains all the way down the wall by the coffee machine.|- On arrival we had been given just two towels between us for a 5 night stay. No hand towels, no mat for the shower which was dangerous given you were stepping out of the shower onto a tiled floor, no teatowel to dry up the glasses or coffee cups. The towels we were given were threadbare and had stains on them. We messaged asking for a shower mat etc and towels with no stains on. We were then given a shower mat and some more towels which were unstained but which had bleach marks on them (they were coloured towels). We never got any tea towels for the glasses and cups so had to let them drip dry.|- No washing equipment had been provided to wash the glasses and cups, so all we could do was rinse them under the tap.|- A couple of days after we checked in the lock on our door started to fail intermittently. We messaged asking to have it fixed as we were struggling to get in and out of the room. The owner came over and said there wasn’t much he could do as he didn’t have any spares available although there might be one available in the San Juan office. We explained that we weren’t going to be able to stay for the rest of the nights booked as we couldn’t be in a situation where we couldn’t either enter or leave the room when we wanted. We left him to think of a resolution and when we came back to the room the lock had been changed and worked perfectly, which was great. However a couple of days later we heard the people in the next door room struggling with their lock in the same way we had so it seems as if he just passed the problem onto another guest rather than deal with it properly.|- The night before we were leaving the sinks and toilets started making a gurgling sound. Early the next morning at about 7am, there was a long period of gurgling and then what looked like and smelt like sewage water backed up into the shower. As we needed to leave to get to our next destination we didn’t have time for someone to come out and either fix it or clean it, so we were forced to clean the shower area the best we could and wear disposable slippers whilst showering just in case there was any residual matter left on the floor. I messaged the owner as we left to explain what had happened and to suggest he got a plumber to have a look at it before the next guests arrived. I could see he had read the message but he never responded, not even to apologise for the experience we had just had in terms of having to clear sewage out of the shower.|- The deluxe suite is billed as having direct access onto the outside entertaining space. It does…but this means you are have people looking in through your full length glass doors whilst you are in the room and have to listen to their noise and music even if you are trying to relax. It also means that the conduct of those guests also impacts you quite directly. Some of the other guests staying at the time were quite frankly pigs and left beer cans, coffee cups and on one day loads of bread all over the tables for the cleaners to deal with. We had to look at this rubbish and filth as we went in and out of the room. The behaviour of other guests is not the responsibility of the owner but it is a consideration if you are choosing to stay in those rooms.|- The hotel is on an incredibly noisy road. There was almost constant traffic noise every night we were there, all through the night and there is also a bottle shop on the corner of the street, about 75 yards away which attracted large crowds of noisy people playing very loud music every evening into the early hours. Again this is not the fault of the owner but is a significant consideration if you are choosing to stay here. We were exhausted by the time we left due to lack of sleep.|- The buildings either side of The Surfing Turtle are derelict and ramshackle. It’s not a very nice environment to have as a view from the balcony. Again that is not the owners responsibility but is a significant consideration if you are deciding to stay here.||We were incredibly disappointed by our experience here. Whilst some of the issues are outside of the owners responsibility, many of the things that spoilt our stay were things that could and should have been done better by the owner, especially for the price we were paying. We much prefer to support smaller boutique hotels than the larger chains but owners like this don’t do anything positive to encourage the support of...

The context of this stay was a one-night stay (on a Tuesday night) during a 5-day tour I did of Puerto Rico with my father, age 78. We booked two rooms, room 2 and 3, one of which has a single king-sized bed and the other a queen-sized bed. Dad had room 2 and I had room 3.||This is a fine choice if the focus of your travel is the place you are visiting rather than the accommodations. I would be less keen on this property if there were going to be a lot of "in-room" time. But if you're mostly going to be out and about, and using the room mainly for sleeping and showering and using the bathroom, this is a great property: clean, comfortable, safe, affordable.||There is no lobby or attended desk. There's a numeric keypad on the room doors. On the day of your arrival, you will receive a text message with the numeric code for your room(s). Guests are asked to send a text to announce their check-in, and similarly report their check-out.||The rooms are somewhat minimalist but are clean and comfortable. There's a small "dorm size" refrigerator. There is no parking on-site, but it was pretty easy to find nearby on-street parking on a Tuesday evening. I suspect it might be more difficult to find parking on weekends when there are more day-trippers for the nearby beach, but I don't know for sure.||Luquillo Beach is an easy 5-minute walk. The stretch of beach off to the east is lengthy span of undeveloped, natural beach devoid of condos, apartments, or any other shoreside development. In the rooms are a supply of beach items for guests to use, including beach chairs.||There's a nice second-floor outdoor patio with a couple of picnic tables.||There's a small cafe across the street that seemed to be a popular breakfast option for tourists. For the less culinarily adventurous, a McDonalds and Wendy's are a 3-minute drive, as is a large supermarket called Amigo.||Some of these reviews mention noise. We did not experience any noise from other guests. But do be aware there are some occasional noisy vehicles that come down the street, stereos blasting, or with modified exhaust systems designed to maximize engine noise.||One oddity that may make some guests cringe is that a sign in the bathrooms directs guests not to place toilet paper in the toilet; you're supposed to put it in the wastebasket next to the toilet. I encountered this in some other places in Puerto Rico. If this makes you think, "ew, gross", well, to put this politely, you can use the shower to take care of that which toilet paper would ordinarily accomplish.||The one main complaint I would have is that after making the reservation (for two rooms) and getting the confirmation, I noted a $70 cleaning fee (which I presume is $35 per room). As I recall, this fee was not disclosed anywhere on the website until after I completed the reservation. The inn is still a good value even with the cleaning fee, but it seems kind of sneaky and underhanded to toss this in after the guest has provided his or her credit card information and made the reservation, which is subject to a 10% penalty for cancellation.||Overall, a good choice, and I give it a thumbs up provided you're not going to be spending a lot of waking hours...

This is a hostel with several "hotel" rooms that I would advise you to avoid. ||This place is all marketing from what I can tell. It's one of these abominations that cropped up with the rise of AirBnB that seems focused only on taking money and does not provide value. It is way overpriced and not a good experience.||The place looked mostly clean overall, but the two plastic chairs had stained and very thin cushions. The bedsheets were stained too, and thin, with mattress stains visible through the bottom sheet. Time will tell if it was bed bugs but I woke up in the middle of the night with what felt like bites from them. And that was after deciding to wear long-sleeve pajamas because of the thin sheets.||And that was like 3 am. I couldn't even fall asleep until after midnight because the ground-floor room is literally 3 feet from the town's main road which gets loud traffic until late. And then the club down the street cranks noise until midnight. Wasn't a great start to the night.||The room is minimalistic. Bare or painted concrete. No amenities. Coffee mugs are provided, but no coffee maker, so the mugs are just decorative. They don't even offer a bottle of water. No safe so be careful because the door locks are junk. No desk, hence no place to sit and write. No luggage rack. No place for your clothes: no dresser or wardrobe. Don’t even think about a pool or similar. There isn’t even any common inside space to share with other guests. There's no reception and so no way to adjust anything. They take your money online and then are disengaged.||The build out is shoddy. Bathroom is cramped with open shower next to toilet and light switches that don’t turn off. The shower only half works: the water pressure is too low for the overhead shower. Also the handle to control the shower is cheap and doesn't work well.||The place appears as a hotel online but then charges a substantial cleaning fee the way an AirBnB would. That too is strange. The price appeared reasonable, but then with the cleaning fee it was much higher. To be fair the person on the phone was open and kind and understood my surprise and gave me a chance to decline the booking. So I made the decision to stay here with knowledge of that fee and the thought that I’d stay multiple nights and it would average out. But I would not stay another night here. People I spoke with in town said that the owners changed a few years ago. That they never see people staying multiple nights and that it mostly caters to back-packers staying in the dorm rooms. ||To pay over $200 to stay in a place that I’d never offer for rent and that by rights should not be permitted is a nasty side-effect of the AirBnB phenomenon. A place like this in the past, if it existed at all, would be better and charge less than half what this place charges. To offer something low quality at a high price, while not illegal, doesn't square with their online reviews, which I now think are likely fake or...