Goldtrail Holidays Review – Hotel Etap Altinel, Bodrum

The Holiday from Hell

On the 1st to the 8th  of August 2009 myself and two of my close friends decided to book a holiday to Turkey.

We all work full time and despite being well travelled individuals thought due to ease (lads being lads) that we would book our weeks break a few weeks before departure and to make things even easier and book an all inclusive to make things even easier. We were booked into the 5 star Hotel Etap Altinel near Bodrum.

Note: Although this sounds like a ‘lads’ holiday, (which in essence it was) it was more of a chilled break . We all work full time and have very busy lives, one of us a professional rugby player and the other two take rugby quite seriously so it was never going to be a 6 night bender, more like a planned 2 bigger nights and the others spent playing some cards, having a few quiet drinks and enjoying each other’s company.

The all inclusive didn’t come cheap either, 3 of us sharing a room came to just under £2100. However we felt the spend was almost justified with the hotel being rated as a ‘5 sun’ by Goldtrail and having all our drinks and meals included and only being able to travel at peak time.

It’s still the most i’ve ever spent on a 7 day holiday though! We’re all very easy going guys and don’t often like to complain, but the facilities, staff and eventful bit of food poisoning tipped us over the edge!

Here’s the lowdown on what simply wasn’t up to standard for a 3 star never mind a 5 star hotel!

The Room

Air Conditioning disabled…we were told that we had to pay £25 for this (5 Star Hotel in a boiling hot country)

• Dirty fridge
• Leaking shower
• Exposed wires
• small and very uncomfortable beds
• Towls only changed once (despite using them to mop the leaking floor)

The Staff

Most couldn’t speak English and we perceived quite unhelpful due to this, despite our best efforts to be nice to them

The Gym

• Appauling!
• No Aircon
• Weights hanging on by a thread on machines
• Nothing to secure free weights
• Complete lack of equipment
• Dirty

The Sauna/ Massage facilities

• Dirty
• Smelt of sewage

The Pool

• Good size
• Water features surrounding never worked
• Children’s pool particularly dirty

The tennis court

Out of action and massively in need of repair!

The Food

• The food was below standard and now where near the quality that you would expect from a 5 star hotel.
• Food was re-used e.g. Eggs used in the morning were re-used at lunch, simply by drizzling a 1000 island sauce over them, most of the food was bland and catered mostly towards eastern Europeans.

The Drink

• Table water poored from jugs which we’re sure came from the taps and not bottles…(advised against drinking tap water)
• Alcohol – barely tasted alcoholic, potentially watered down but also a very disapponiting selection, not that we were able to drink hardly any of it! (see samonella  below)

On the facilities, basically this video, filmed by Peter Gray who was there roughly the same time as us explains it all…

Catching Salmonella

We weren’t happy with the supposed 5 star accommodation to say the least, especially considering the amount of money that we had payed. We arrived on the Saturday and to our normally very sturdy stomach’s disappointment we felt sick just after we had eaten form the mixed buffet on Monday lunch time.

It started with Will, an hour later me and a few hours after that Andy. Horrendous vomiting followed by uncontrollable dioreha. I’ll spare you the details but 3 lads, 1 very small bathroom, both ends is all that I need to say.

We were horrifically ill for a good 3 days. Eventually on the Friday we escaped the hotel on a boat trip (organised ourselves) which left from Bodrum and had our last evening eating out for fearof getting ill of the sub standard food. This was obviously quite annoying especially when you’ve payed for all inclusive but at the time we just couldn’t face it.

On arriving back to the UK it was still very clear that we still weren’t better. And even now, some two weeks after, we are still not 100%. The professional athlete amongst us was seen immediately by the club doctor on arrival home in the UK. After some tests it was apparent the illness we had all being suffering from was in fact Salmonella. I spoke to some other people in the hotel a few days after we first got sick and they too had mentioned that they had been ill. During our illness I tried to go to see the doctor, to at least tey to tell him about the illness and see maybe if anyone else was suffering. Unfortunately, like all the staff, the Nurse’s English was very poor, I spoke to a translator on the phone who said that the doctor was on visits around Bodrum. Knowing that the most they could do was provide us with some Dioralite or similar we chose to just stay bed bound and get ourselves better.

Guess What! We’re Complaining!

Since returning home, i’ve read several other complaints about Goldtrail holidays. The most notable being from Peter Gray who stayed at the same hotel roughly the same time as us. You can read his review on his own dedicated blog here. Thanks Peter for the video!

It’s also already been featured on BBC Watchdog! I really should’ve seen this before I went. Although a lot of the complaints feature around it being cheap and dirty, £700 was certainly not cheap!

And as you can see the general gist on the high authority travel review site Trip Advisor isn’t too good either.

So Goldtrail, we want our money back! We would like an apology too and an assurance that you won’t put anyone else through such an awful holiday experience.

We will be writing to ABTA too and keep updating you with progress on here and on Peter’s blog.

More pictures on my Flickr profile here.