IFA Buenaventura Hotel - Playa del Ingles, Spain 

having booked just a few days before, we as a young couple had few expectations. However, the hotel is clean,tidy,accessible but needs a lick of paint! the pool area is nice (loud pool for germans and russians!) quiet pool ideal for couples and families!! Food average and wait for table not a problem. checkout is at 12! keeping a room on till 8 was 22euros and worth every cent! kasbah,netto,spar ideal as a stone throw away aswel as the beach (sunbeds cost 7.50euros though!) all in all good hotel but wouldnt go back unless price was the same as we paid under ?300pp in late deal half board for a week. great little restaurant around the corner called patio canario good value for money!

We went stayed at this hotel for two weeks last summer. We booked about 6 weeks before departure so got a good standard of hotel for a much lower price. We booked through Thomas Cook after a lot of shopping around. The location was good, near to lots of the commercial centres and not far from the beach. The room was clean and adequate for the stay. What you would generally expect from a Spanish hotel, we had no complaints. We asked for a room over-looking the second pool (not the one with the bridge in the pictures) which is called the animation pool. Don't ask for this if you want a quiet room! We liked this because we could hear the music from the pool during the day and watch the evening entertainment at night from our balcony if we wanted. There was lots of veried acts and although they weren't really to our taste, we did find some of them quite amusing for the wrong reasons. The hotel did have some resident cats which I found odd and I don't like cats. The food in the hotel was good with lots of choices. The menu for the evening is always displayed in the morning. The food changes each day but there are some staples which are always there such as pasta with varying sauces and pizza for the less adventurous. Veal came up quiet often, I'm not sure if this was typical of Spain or if it was to cater for the German guests. The desserts were typical spanish style but there was also ice cream every day in various flavours. Occasionally there would be a special extra such as freshly made smoothies one day at breakfast or another day there was chocolate pancakes (the rest of the breakfast was the same each day as you might expect so these were nice extras). At dinner and breakfast you can choose your own table which was great. I hate it when you're a couple and you're forced to sit on a four table with two strangers for two weeks! The beach was very nice although to get back you have to walk up steps or a bit of a hill. There were shops all along the beach including a McDonalds at one end. The commercial centres were a bit dissapointing for me. Some of them looked very dated and run down with many of the shops closed. Some were still worth a look though. The good things was that there were lots of them and some were better than others so you could visit each and see what it was like. Definately watch out for the women trying to sell bracelets at the beach. I read reviews before I went about keeping away from them as they will try to strap a bracelet to you arm and then force you to pay a stupid price for it. I'm glad I read these reviews as sure enough, everytime they would say hello and ask where we from whilst trying to shake your hand to get the bracelet on you. As we knew what they were up to we always kept our arms folded and kept walking. We saw them moved on by the Police a few times but they were always back the next day. There were also lots of timeshare touts but my boyfriend and I weren't bothered by them once - we obviously didn't look old enough or rich enough! The pool area was nice (the front one with bridge). There weren't enough sun loungers but this didn't bother us as we preferred to go to the beach. The reception staff were friendly and all spoke English. When we arrived we had been allocated a ground floor room (which I didn't want as I felt this wasn't very secure) on the quiet side of the hotel. After a bit of persuading the receptionist swapped us to a high floor on the amimation pool side. We were very pleased with this. You can hire a fridge but it's very expensive so we didn't although we would have liked one. I don't remember exactly but it was a lot of money for the two weeks. We did hire a safe which I think was 2 Euro per day plus about 10 Euro. I think the fridge may have been 5 Euro per day. We got the local bus to a shopping centre which was easy. The shopping centre was fine, it had shops such as Zara and a huge supermarket where prices were lower than the small supermarkets in resort. One evening we got a cab to Meloneras. This was a lovely resort, very new and expensive looking. Not a run down commercial centre in site! I doubt we could have afforded to stay there and all of the restaurants looked classy but pricey but it was great to see for the evening. There is a casino here too and shops such as Mango. The hotel was good overall and I probably would stay in it again if I had liked the area more. I think I prefer resorts with a long promenade and shopping streets to the commercial centre set up we found here.