I was taken here as a surprise birthday, and on arrival I was so happy to see where we were staying, the hotel looked beautiful. We were escorted to our room, we arrived at 7 so it was quite dark and the view from our room was amazing, mount Etna glowing in the distance..... From here our experience with the hotel went down hill!!

Our room was tiny, barely not enough room to swing a cat, and we had just an ensuite shower. I complained once I found out how much we had paid for our room, and after our neighbouring japenese tourists showed us their room which was more than tripple the size of our room and they had a bath!! The receptionist said we would have to wait till the manager was back in tomorrow, seeing we were there for a short trip, I was annoyed. 20 minutes later a porter showed up with out warning saying he was taking us to another room!! I was in the shower at the time, so a warning would have been nice!

Our new room was far better, have no idea if it was a suite, but it is what I am used to staying in as a standard room when staying in 5 stars.Would have been very happy if it had been our room on arrival but felt somewhat annoyed with the room they had given us in the first place.

For breakfest the next day, we had to walk in to the kitchen and call out as we had waited for over 10 minutes and were very hungry!! the waiter pleasently asked us what we would like, they did not have a menu!! so he said he would bring a selection over to us, which was nice enough but would have prefered to chooses our selves! and this kind of service continued all the way through our visit, if we wanted a drink at the down stairs bar after travelling a few floors down, you would then walk back up to the stairs and ask reception if some one can serve you!! each breakfast we had to go in to the kitchen and call out!! I think if we were not having such a fantastic time on holiday the whole hotel experience could have ruined it. We forgot our phone charger, and it was our fault but the hotel didnt have a spare, they cant exchange money, there was no english speaking channels on SKY, we were not allowed to swim in the pool.

We (I promise you) were the only people in the whole HUGE hotel, (apart from the japenese tourists I spoke about earlier who were there for only one night that we were), and we actually felt that we were an inconveniance to the hotel by the end of it!!! It would have been nice if they treated us that little bit better as there was no one else there for them to service! and this fact really annoyed me when I considered that as the only tourists there they put us in a box room!!!

I know that other peoples reviews are really complementing, so looking at it from the hotels point of view, we were not there in peak season which is why perhaps there was not full time staff available at the designated points, the hotel is lovely and when filled with tourists who are allowed to use the swimming pool Im sure there would be more of an atmosphere to the place, I hate to go on about it but the room thing was inexcusable! The menu's for dinner really did look fabulous, but we obviosly wanteed to spend as little time as posible at this hotel and prefer atleast a little bit of atmosphere, this place lacked that!