Fuerteventura 2011

When we decided to book a package holiday for our summer holiday this year, I was optimistic.  I had not been on a a package holiday in years, but wanted a proper family holiday that would suit my two year old and my sister who has special needs a can't walk very far.  After lots of research and advice we decided on Fuerteventura which is the second largest Canary Island after Tenerife. Mainly because I had been to Majorca in May before and the weather can be a bit hit and miss. The flight was very good on the way out, we decided not to book any in flight meals, but there was a snack trolley you can buy from and apparently you can hire a PSP from the airline to play games if you are bored.  They were charging £7 for this.

Costa Calma

In the past, I have always booked my holidays myself booking the accommodation and flights separately but wanted this to be as easy as possible so decided to book through Thomas Cook after looking through stacks of brochures.  We decided on the 4* Costa Calma Beach Resort on an all inclusive basis. Having checked Trip Advisor
before we booked, it had very mixed views and it seemed the best of a bad bunch but looked as though it had everything we wanted and needed for our family.  The coach journey from the airport took one hour to the resort of Costa Calma where we were staying.  We arrived at the Hotel at around 9.30pm and the Hotel had arranged food for us as the restaurant had closed. The Hotel looked very clean and the reception staff were very friendly on arrival and we were checked in very quickly. We had requested adjacent rooms which we were given and the rooms were spacious and clean. My only gripe, and it is not with just this Hotel, it seems to be the same wherever you go on package Holiday Hotels is that it is always twin beds.  Do Double beds not exist anymore?  I have stayed in Chain Hotels where there are twin beds but they are clipped together underneath to make a double, but can be separated if required.  Anyway moan over, I had requested an extra pillows for us and within 10 minutes I had them.

One of the pools

We didn't go to the welcome meeting as we lost track of time plus it is hard trying to get a 2 year old to sit still for 5 minutes never mind 1 hour. Our rooms had a side sea view and was nice and bright with a decent size balcony and more importantly clean and had air conditioning (more about that later). The dining room was huge with plenty of chairs and tables and loads of choice of food. There were breakfast cereals, yoghurt's, fruit and meat and if you fancied a cooked breakfast that was available or pancakes and cakes and if you were really hungry you could have some of everything.  As well as the main restaurant, there is a snack bar in the grounds near the pools which serve Continental Breakfast, Lunch, snacks and Coffee and Cakes in the afternoon. You definitely would not go hungry anyway. On All Inclusive all food and drink are free from 0800-2300.  If you wanted drinks after 2300, you had to buy vouchers from the reception but nobody did this, they went to the bar before 2300 and got a few rounds in.

Costa Calma Hotel Beach

There is a kids club within the Hotel, but children must be 4 to go in it, but they got to do treasure hunts, art, games and other activities and at night between 8pm and 9pm there was the 'Mini Disco' where the entertainments crew got the kids dancing to Agadoo, Superman and The music man among other 80's classics.  My little boy loved it and we had to make sure we had eaten by 8pm so he could go and do his boogie boogie dancing. There were very few British at this Hotel (which didn't bother us), it seemed to be mostly Italians, Germans and Polish people. There are five swimming pools in total (2 are children's pools) and there is absolutely no reason to get up early and reserve sun beds as there are lots of areas and more than enough for everybody including the 2 beach areas in addition to the pool areas.  There is also a roof top area for the sun worshippers where there is just sun beds and no umbrellas or shaded areas.

Costa Calma Beach

The Costa Calma Beach resort is huge, as well as the 5 pool areas, there is a sister Hotel in the grounds which is the Nautilus Beach which I had a nosey and that looked very nice too. As well as plenty going on for the kids, there is plenty of activities for adults too should you be bored. All are free and they include Archery, Table Tennis, Shooting and darts. There was also aqua aerobics in the afternoon and the Hotel has a Padi Diving centre too. There is a leisure centre which has a sauna, massages and a gym. There are computers that you can use at the Hotel, should you want to access the Internet at EUR1 per 10 minutes.  You can also pay for wifi if you have a lap top with you which is EUR 5 for 24 hours and you can access this anywhere in the hotel including your room, but please be aware this does not work for Ipod's as we found out.

Another of the pools

 There is entertainment six nights a week and as I mentioned before it is mini disco between 8pm and 9pm.  Then they have the 'Diploma ceremony' between 9-9.30pm which is certificates awarded to the winners of the days activities. The entertainment includes Flamenco Dancing, Snake Lady, funny sketches, and singers (some bad and some very bad).   We spent most of the week by one of the children's pools which my little boy loved.  At the beginning of the week he wouldn't go in on his own and by the end wouldn't go in with us, he wanted to do it all himself. The food selection at lunch times was very varied with a choice of pasta, cold meats, chips, fruits and cake. Dinner also had a wide choice of food with different themes every night such as 'Spanish', 'British' and 'German' so they would have soup, then maybe a stew or steak, paella, pasta or fish and again the cold meats favoured by Europeans and ice cream, cakes and fruit. They were quite strict at the evening meal than men could not wear shorts or vests. This depended on who was on the door as the night my hubby was sent away for wearing long short, when we finally sat down to eat, there were quite a few men in there with shorts on.

Roof Terrace suntrap

We didn't take a pram with us as we picked the Hotel for the simple fact that we didn't need to go walking anywhere and it had everything that we needed in the resort and it did. However we thought it would also be a shame to not see any of Costa Calma at all so this is where we had a problem. I asked the Hotel if they had a spare pram knocking about anywhere that we could borrow for a couple of hours, but of course they didn't.  I came up with an idea that I would ask our rep Abi thinking that I know what the answer will be but if you don't ask then you don't get. I did ask her and she said she would see what she could do and get back to me.  Sure enough the next day (her day off) she rang me to say she had managed to borrow one from the office and would drop it off at the Hotel.  Not only did she do this she dropped it off on her day off and was an absolute star.  We did have a walk into Costa Calma and it took about 15 minutes to the Shopping Center (well I dispute the phrase Shopping Centre), it had about 5 shops one of which was a Spar and a few shops selling tat.  There was a coffee shop and a couple of bars.  The resort of Costa Calma is made up of Resort Hotels so most guests are on all inclusive so there isn't really the need for lots of shops and bars but if you were booked on a self catering basis then I think you would have to eat in the Hotels or you would struggle.    You don't really need to leave the Hotels as they all have their own beaches, pools and shops within the Hotel.

Pool Bar

As I mentioned before we did not attend the welcome meeting so we had a look at the Thomas Cook folder to see what else the resort offers.  There didn't appear to be that many local trips that you could book other than the Oasis Park which we didn't go to but it is kind of a zoo/nature park and has sea lion displays, Camel Rides and petting farm among other attractions.  It is approx 5km from Costa Calma resort and is EUR24 for adults and EUR12 for children 3-11.




The Hotel we stayed at is actually and Apart Hotel and offers different rates from self catering, bed and breakfast to All Inclusive, although I think if you booked self catering you would struggle unless you intended to eat in the various Hotels as there is not very many restaurants. The food rates at the Costa Calma Beach Hotel are as follows. Breakfast EUR7.50, Lunch EUR16.00, Dinner EUR16.00 and All Inclusive EUR33.00.  All meals are buffet style so you can help yourselves as many times as you like. Drinks are also included on All Inclusive and in the restaurants and snack bars there is coffee machines, Local beer tap and soft drinks tap which has coke/coke diet/sprite/fanta orange/fanta lemon so you can help yourself whenever. There is also a water tap which people used to take empty bottles and fill up.  The bar has cocktails, local liquors and other drinks.  The Hotel rooms have mini bars which are empty, however the fridge was still cold even though it didn't have any contents in so we used to keep our water in there to keep it nice and cool.






There are three shops in the Costa Calma Beach Hotel/Resort for your convenience.  There is a jewellery shop selling mainly silver and gold, a convenience shop selling cigarettes, suncream, pool toys, sweets and newspapers as well as souvenir Tat. There is also a surf shop selling O'Neill branded clothing such as swimwear, jumpers (because you need a jumper in the Canaries!) and other items of clothing.  There are also 2 vending machines selling overpriced bars of chocolate for about 2 Euros.
In the snack bar by the pool there is a freezer where you can go and help yourself to ice cream tubs for when it gets really warm. We found that it could be quite cloudy and even grey in the mornings (although still warm) and it looked like it was going to rain a few times, but apparently this is quite common and even though it is grey, the sun is still out above the clouds so when you think you can't get burnt, you most definitely can.  It never did rain and was always warm with a nice breeze.
 We were coming to the end of this holiday and if anybody is thinking of going to this Hotel and has a look at trip advisor, please do not be put off by the reviews, it is a lovely Hotel and is very clean and the staff were lovely and went out of their way to help.  The only very small quibble that I would have is that after the Mini disco finishes at 9pm there is nothing really for children to do as there is entertainment on and the kids got bored . There is a games room with pool tables, football tables but that is all and anybody knows it is hard to keep them entertained. Luckily for us, we had some 'Peppa Pig' episodes on our Ipods for him to sit and watch which worked for a while until he got bored and wanted to run around. Our flight was at 2100 in the evening, so we decided to pay EUR30 to keep our room until our 1730 pick up time which is worth the money.

Broncemar Beach

Now here is where things get interesting and unfortunately for us, the next 24 hours will be remembered for ever. So we got to the airport at checked in and airports are never great with young children anyway, but to be fair to Fuerteventura Airport, they do have a play area with a slide, bus and a few other things for the kids to play on so that helped and I don't know why more airports don't take note.  Anyway we are sat on the flight ready to head on the runway (this is 9pm at night) and then the pilot announced that there may be a 'small problem' with one of the wheels and they were taking the plane back to the base as a precaution.  Shortly afterward the head stewardess made the dreaded announcement. 'Ladies and Gentleman we are sorry to have to inform you that there is a problem with one of the wheels and the engineers do not have the equipment here to fix it so unfortunately we are going to have to offload everybody and put you all in accommodation and try and get the problem fixed tomorrow as the airport is now closed'.

 

Dangerous wire next to metal pipe

I was quite excited at first as we were being taken to Caleta de Fuste ten minutes from the airport and we had actually looked at booking into staying here at first but decided on Costa Calma. We were being divided into two hotels being the 4* Barcelo and the 3* Broncemar Beach which I know 2 people who had stayed here so wasn't worried. Being one of the last off the aircraft we were told that we were going to the Broncemar Beach. The Resort is ten minutes drive from the airport so we got there quite quickly but it was nearly 11pm at night and everybody was beginning to get grouchy. 

The 'Child Friendly' Terrace

The Airtours Rep was very good and I think he was in the pub when he got the call as his shift had finished hours ago, but he was on hand organising everybody and said that families would be checked in first.  we got the keys to our two rooms that we needed and headed to them. (The Broncemar reminded me of Butlins in that the rooms/apartments were in little villages with road names.) We eventually found our rooms and opened the first door and the first sight that greeted me was a dead cockroach in the kitchen/living area which is where the pull down bed that my toddler would be sleeping it. If there is one thing I hate more than anything, it is cockroaches dead or alive.  I walked out and decided I would have a quick look to see if my sisters adjacent room was any better.

Nope. Her apartment was in darkness and had no lock or more importantly door handle on it.  As I went back to tell my hubby I was going to go to reception to tell them he told me to come and look at the bathroom. I kid you now there wasn't just one but loads of what looked like ants or something small crawling all over the bathroom.  It was filthy and disgusting and there was no way any of my family were going to stay there.  When I got to reception and told the receptionist, she looked at me as if if was stupid and just said that a maintenance man was coming to fix the door with no handle and that's the best she would do.

The rep was still in reception (I think he was called Paul) and I told him and he told the receptionist they must find me a better room. I was given a 2 bed roomed apartment on the first floor, so made my way back to the family and we found the new apartment.  Hubby opened the door and all I heard was 'I don't believe this' the living room was flooded and I don't mean a splash of water I mean proper flooded. Somebody had decided the defrost the fridge which was in the kitchen/living room area and the floor was covered in water. Hubby went to reception this time and we were told to wait for somebody to come and mop up. By this time it was getting nearer to midnight. I had a look round the rest of the apartment and while there was nothing alive and crawling (that I could see) it was grubby. The bath which had the shower in was filthy with hairs in it, the kitchen worktops was grubby and had chunks missing out of it and if you are less than 7 foot (which we all are) then you need to hold the shower head and hold it over you as the shower head holder was near the ceiling.  The beds looked cleanish but we decided not to take any chances and slept on top of them and was scratching all night (although I do think it was my imagination after what we had seen). I personally think that the rooms that we were put in are not used until peak season, so have probably been cleaned ages ago and were not going to be done again until it gets busy, so we didn't fancy taking our chances with their towels either.  One other very important factor you need to know if you are going to stay at the Broncemar is that they don't have air conditioning and charge EUR15 per week to borrow a fan. Now what kind of accommodation in the Canary Islands that is hot all year round doesn't have air conditioning? We woke up about 7ish and just wanted to get out of the room as fast as possible. One thing I noted in the kitchen (see above picture) is that there was a bare wire next to the metal water pipe, so you just have to hope your not in the shower if they decide to touch.  Also I wanted to have a look at the terrace (we were on the 1st floor), and the rail was as wobbly as anything and on the terrace was a very small wall which my 2 year old would have climbed on no problem with an even smaller side which when you fall off it (because boys like climbing) you would fall two stories.  Not exactly child friendly.  I really wish had filmed or taken pictures of our first room, but we just wanted to get out of there ASAP.  My hubby took a video of the room that we stayed in which is below. 

After breakfast and getting out of the hell hole, we did have a wander round Caleta de Fuste before or pick up at 1200.  There was certainly a lot more going on than Costa Calma, there were plenty of shops, restaurants and bars and it was full on English people. It seemed like a nice resort but we chose Costa Calma as we didn't want to be going very far and wanted everything handy which it was.

I don't blame Thomas Cook for anything and to be fair all the reps, cabin crew and everybody we came into contact with were fantastic and helpful and it wasn't their fault.  When you have to get 150 people into accommodation in very short notice, you have to use every available resource.  Thomas Cook own Airtours (who use the Broncemar Beach)  but it is not in the Thomas Cook brochure.  I find it very hard to believe that there would be any good feedback for this hotel.  (3* Plus - more like 2*) 

We did eventually get home 20 hours late, and had a great holiday apart from the last 24 hours.  If I had checked into the Broncemar Hotel at the beginning of my stay, I would have been on the next flight home.

The video of the room we stayed in