Our stay at Taurito Princess felt more like 'Be Confused' than their tagline, which is 'Be Inspired.' Midway through our stay, we had a family meeting on whether to leave early or not, but by then we seemed to have struggled through figuring out how things work.
First, the highlights of the stay were the sun, swimming in the pool, the FRAM animation team, the room cleaning ladies were great, the Canary Diving school located underneath the hotel and Rickie. We can recommend Gran Canaria again, but not this hotel.
The trouble started upon arrival, when the room wasn't available yet. After such a long flight with kids, this already isn't acceptable in my opinion. But the hotel did have a late breakfast available at the Choza restaurant, so we could get some food. When getting to the restaurant, not knowing how anything works, we set down our backpacks on some nearby rocks. Shortly after a lady working in the restaurant moved this giant moving table just in the way of the rocks. She looked at the bags, looked at me with what I thought was an 'F-you' look and put this big table in the way. I had to climb around the table, get the bag, and then we she came back and saw the bag on the table then she became animated and started saying "No! No! No! No!..." Welcome to Taurito Princess.
After returning to the front desk a few times (the room was continually not ready when promised), we received the room keys and instructions, "Go through those glass doors to the rooms." The issue was there are no rooms through the doors. There are stairs and elevators. How could elevators be made so confusing? The buttons are on a iPad looking thing, and there is buttons for Hall, Pool, 1, 2, 3, et. We were on level 1. What could go wrong? For some reason, the elevator stopped and we got out, but the level was marked '0'on the wall. Wait a second.... Weren't we on level 0? Back in, and for some reason we visited the 2nd and 3rd floors, until getting back to 0. At this point, after the long day of travel, getting told off by the restaurant lady, and can't find the room, I was already done. When the reception refused to show me to the room, I had to take some time on the couches out in the front in order to get my head around that this is the kind of service that I had to look forward to for the next two weeks. Hint: Pool level is level 0.
Quick note that this was our first, and will be the last, visit to an all inclusive resort. Now we know. It's like the Taurito Princess is an Escape Room, except they only tell you half the clues. I've travelled through Spain quite a bit, and the lack of professionalism here is not cultural.
So we get down to dinner that night for more uncomfortable surprises. When trying to enter, I get stopped firmly by the doorman / manager with the instruction that I need to wear pants? Eh? How would we have known that? On the single paper of welcome instructions at check-in, it did say Dress Code, but was not explained what this meant. This stop at the door became a ritual, as pretty every evening we were able to witness the next newly arrived and not informed family get stopped at the door and turned away from dinner.
The dress code seems to work like this... Men, in the downstairs Paradise restaurant need to wear pants for dinner. That's it. Women and children can wear anything they way. The Paradise restaurant is basically a packed food hall. Granted, the food is ok, but it's busy and chaotic. No obvious reason at all for pants on men in this restaurant, other than to confuse and annoy the guests. Even more confusing, for the special Spanish and Italian/Asian dinners upstairs in the Choza restaurant, which are much more finer dinning in location (the food is about the same), there is no dress code. Again, Be Confused!
This brings me to the making of reservations for the special dinners. I'm still not sure if you make the reservations upstairs or downstairs. I think the Italian/Asian reservation you make in the Choza upstairs at lunch, and the Spanish you make downstairs (even though the dinner is upstairs), and that is done at breakfast.
Apparently, you need to bring the little card that they give you when making the reservation with you to the dinner in order to get into the dinner. Well, we didn't seem to need one for the Spanish dinner, but we certainly did for the Italian/Asian dinner. They don't tell you that when making the reservation, and on the back of the little card it literally states, "Please, get in touch with the head waiter in order to make your reservation." What? Again, it was a ritual to see people turned away from the dinner in order to go get their little card that they weren't informed to bring.
Oh, and the highlight of the story was Rickie, our guest cockroach which we found in the room walking across the walls. Lovely. read more
