My family and I stayed at the Santa Maria for 2 days in March and a further 1 day in April. It is a lovely new hotel based conveniently between the airport and the city. The bedrooms are spacious and comfortable, the bathrooms are very good. It has an excellent, large swimming pool right next to the golf course. The restaurant, bar and pool bar serve great food. The staff are all very friendly and are trying hard to please.
I really wish I could have given this hotel a five star rating, especially as I am very conscious that this will be one of the first genuine reviews on the hotel. However both our stays were a little too stressful due to teething issues with this new hotel. If we were paying a discounted rate I would be more forgiving. However we were paying the full advanced booking rate and at no point did the hotel make any concessions towards us (e.g. a room upgrade, a free meal, a free drink, etc). Given the hotel was virtually empty, that we were paying full rates, that we had numerous issues, and that the staff were in training, it would have seemed like a good move by the hotel to have given something to us. But no, quite the opposite, they tried to charge us for everything and more.
To give a flavour of the issues we encountered in our short stay with the hotel. We had no hot water for almost 24 hours on arrival. It took two complaints to get this fixed. We again had the water turned off on our second stay. Three cold showers in a three night stay is not impressive. Breakfast was a comedy of errors. The staff were trying very hard but they were still in training. So on the first morning, with very slow service, they refused to serve a grapefruit juice with the American breakfast even though they had grapefruit juice and it was on the menu. They would however serve all the other juices. Both mornings they did not have any English breakfast tea in the restaurant. However we did have it in our room, so brought down the teabags ourselves. These types of issues are minor and quite amusing. What wasn't amusing was that on our second stay there was a buffet breakfast. We were told it was included with our room by the waitress. I questioned that because I knew our room rate did not include breakfast. However the waitress assured me that this was included. So we had the buffet and were annoyed to find a $66 charge on our room for the pleasure. I asked reception to remove this which they eventually did after consulting with the restaurant manager.
On our second last day I asked the receptionist if we could check out at 4pm. He said that would be fine and there would be no charge. Given the hotel had virtually no bookings for the next day, I had hoped that would be their response. That evening the receptionist came running up to me as I returned to the hotel from dinner to say that his supervisor had told him that they would have to charge us $85 for the late check out. I later complained to him that I thought they should waive this charge, particularly as we had no hot water for a day on our previous stay a week earlier, so a little give and take wouldn't go amiss. He said he would have to consult his supervisor and get back to me the next day. So we went to bed not knowing whether we would be checking out early or not. The next morning I again contacted reception to find out if we had the later check out. Again the receptionist had to consult her supervisor. She was struggling to get hold of this elusive supervisor but said she could give me until 2pm but only her supervisor could agree to 4pm. This was getting stupid and was wasting our time. Eventually her supervisor agreed to us checking out at 4pm without charge. This whole episode could have been avoided if the original receptionist was allowed to stick with the original agreement. Instead they made me argue and chase to get a small concession out of them. Remember that they offered us nothing for the fact that a five star hotel was booking out rooms with no hot water (and that we had to deal with an engineer in our room at 7am trying to fix it).
As I was getting in the car to leave the hotel, the supervisor (I presume) came up to me to apologise for the issues we had encountered. Whilst I appreciated the apology, it was all a little too late. I completely understand that there are likely to be teething issues with a new hotel, whether it's something not working properly or staff not fully trained. However the hotel needs to acknowledge this and give something back to its (full paying) guests for an inconsistent experience, not a last second apology as they walk out of the door.
I'm sure that The Santa Maria will get lots of five star reviews in the near future. I hope it does well, it is genuinely a lovely place.
