** Read this bit if you are thinking of visiting Barcelona via a Groupon offer **

First off, this hotel was provided through a Groupon deal, which on the face of it looked really good, £169 per person for 2 nights in a 4* hotel in Barcelona with flights included and a 2 course meal and soft drink in the hard rock cafe. When you start to dig deeper though its a bit of a con, for one we had to fly from a London Airport and we live in Bristol so that made things more expensive, then when I looked into it we could have flown from Bristol for marginally more than the cost from Gatwick (where we decided to fly from) and the company that offered the deal were very crafy in only offering you late flights on the day of departure and early flights on the day of return. They were 'kind enough' to offer you other potential flights to allow you to spend more time in Barcelona but this was at an additional surcharge of £40 or more - very crafty! The next thing was the price of the hotel, on the documentation from the holiday provider (clear skies holidays I believe) they found us the rooms through getabed.co.uk which quoted the room prices at rates which seemed pretty high to me - upon going to the H10 marina website myself and typing in the dates we were staying the room rate was <b>considerably</b> cheaper than the rate that had supposedly been paid through getabed. Also the groupon deal did not include breakfast at the hotel this was an extra 15E per day. This was not a major issue as we quite like to sleep in and eat breakfast at our leisure but something to bear in mind if you like to have breakfast included. The hard rock cafe meal was decent, although only includes a soft drink and you can only pick from a set menu of about 5 main courses and an ice cream pudding. We spent 40E on alcoholic drinks in there alone so they definitely made their money back off us. On doing my sums, I worked it out that I could have booked the same holiday to fly from Bristol for at least 100Euros cheaper and still had the meal in hard rock cafe choosing from the full menu rather than the gold one they give you to pick from. So to cut a long story short, before you book a holiday on groupon, look into the flight costs and booking up the hotel yourself as you will more than likely find that you can book everything much cheaper than quoted on groupon. But anyway... I will now give a quick review of the hotel since thats what I'm supposed to be reviewing!

** Read here for Hotel Review **

This hotel is in a brilliant location, in fact one of the best locations you could choose in my opinion. Its about a 10 minute walk from the beach which is really pleasant and well maintained. Maybe it would not be as nice in summer with loads of people on it but in February we saw about 15 people as far as the eye could see and being English a temperature of above 12C is practically beach weather anyway! Dont get me wrong it was cold but when we left England it was -3C so the extra 15 degrees makes a huge difference. If you were in direct sunlight you could be quite warm in just jeans, a tshirt and a sweater.

Local amenities wise the hotel was fairly close to 2 supermarkets which were OK but the best place to get food and booze is Mercandona. Some of the staff in the hotel can tell you where it is (although one receptionist had never even heard of Mercandona) Its just a little bit further from the two closest supermarkets by the Marina metro station but they do much nicer food and have a better selection of cheap alcohol which despite the price is really pleasant to drink - I brought back 7 bottles of really good cava for £10!

For getting around in Barcelona I would recommend the Metro, there are 2 stations close to the hotel, Bogatell (the closest) which goes along the yellow line to most of the places in the centre and then there is the Marina station which is a little bit further but has more lines going much further around the city. A single journey to anywhere costs 2E, and for the time it takes its well worth that. Taxis in Barcelona are everywhere, easily recognisable by the yellow and black colour scheme and they all run on meters but if you want to save yourself a lot of money use the metro when you can its loads cheaper. Our taxi from the airport to the hotel cost 29E. One of the friendly staff at the hotel adivsed us that for the journey back to the airport we should get the metro from Marina to Castella Pl (I think thats the name of it) and get the easily recognisable blue and white Aerobus which only costs 5.50E. We did exactly this and it worked out at just about half the price of the taxi (2E for metro + 5.50E for bus) x 2 = 15E. The bus journey took about 25 minutes. One thing I should mention is that the Aerobus goes to both terminals at the airport and without checking we got dropped off at terminal 1 when we needed to be at terminal 2. There is a free shuttle bus which runs regularly which got us to terminal 2 just in the nick of time. Keep this in mind if you are thinking of getting the Aerobus! One last thing, if you fly with Easyjet from terminal 2, they are right at the end of the airport in gate C, you literally have to walk ages to get there and the signs in the airport do not make it at all obvious where you have to go. Hope someone finds this useful as we nearly missed our flight trying to find gate C. Its almost like the airport has based Easyjet right out in the sticks, make sure you give yourself a good 30 minutes extra to find the gate and check in desk - you'll need it!

As I mentioned earlier the hotel charges separately for breakfast (which may not appeal to some) but personally I think 15E a day is really steep anyway and we were quite happy to venture out and find something to eat ourselves for cheaper. As we never tried any of the food at the hotel I cant comment on what its like, but the restaurant did seem quite posh looking so you would expect the food to not be cheap and horrible.

The staff in the hotel were a mixed bunch, most of them were very helpful and friendly but one or two others did a very good job of making you feel like you were interrupting them from something really important. On the whole though the team on reception were helpful and spoke english well enough to save you from trying to communicate in broken spanish.

The rooms are quite smart and clean (or at least ours was), the air con did take a while to warm up the room but at least it did work. The room had a safe which was free, and a big flatscreen TV which offered mostly spanish and catalan TV stations. Word of warning there is no 'on' button on the TV, after looking for about 20 minutes I finally figured out that the on button is actually a switch on the wall by the bathroom! The bathroom was clean and practical, nice marble type floors with a bath/shower combo, toilet, bday and free toiletries including a shower cap, razor, toothbrush and paste and the usual shower gel, shampoo and soap. Only thing that did hack me off about the room was that there is no tea or coffee making facilities, being English I like the chance to make tea at all times and I had been saving a pot noodle since I got off the plane and lo and behold there was no kettle in the room! On the plus side it did have a mini bar fridge which was good for storing the cava we bought at the local supermarket so that we had a nice cold alcoholic drink to start our evenings with! No idea what any of the stuff in the mini bar cost but unless you like to waste money just buy any drinks and snacks in the local supermarkets - it has to be loads cheaper!

The beds in the room are very hard - not a problem for me as I prefer that to some super soft squidgy matress but might not be for everyone. Our double bed was actually two singles pushed together which most hotels seem to do these days - it was ok but beware of rolling onto the ridge between both beds which is not very comfortable to spend the night on. All in all though I slept really well every night - the pillows provided are really comfortable goose feather or something like that and for me the pillow is generally more important than the matress but thats my preference.

Finally I should mention the swimming pools, there is a roof pool which as far as I could tell is free but is NOT heated. The view from the roof is really impressive and definitely worth a look, I would expect that in the summer the roof pool would be amazing, but in February the pool was absolutely freezing and there was no way any sane person would want to swim in it!
The downstairs leisure/relaxation centre was another story, we knew we had to pay separately for it and initially I thought 15E was really expensive just to go swimming, but it was actually really nice down there. The combination of small swimming pool, warm tub and warm shower pool was really nice (note I call them warm - they were far from hot!). The steam room and sauna were very toasty though and the whole facility was warm with padded sun loungers around the main room. Both me and my partner lay down on one of the loungers for just a few minutes and both of us fell asleep... definitely relaxing down there! So in summary although the price tag seems a bit steep I'd recommend going to the leisure facility in the hotel at least one day. Its well worth it if you spend at least a couple of hours down there.

Overall really liked this hotel and would definitely stay there again, only thing I would do different is to book it myself and not bother with any groupon holidays, its definitely cheaper to do it yourself!