Hotel Riu Bravo

I’ll start first by acknowledging how nice the hotel was, the staff were wonderfully friendly and thorough in their work. You are greeted every day by the restaurant manager and his staff before you sit down to a well prepared tasty and different menu each day. Evening entertainment is always good and although alcohol is not included, it is very reasonably priced. We stayed for five days in two rooms with our family of four. Our rooms overlooked the pool and were well-maintained clean and air-conditioned. Air-conditioning is really good. Despite nearly 38° outside the room was always cool and a haven to get out of the heat of the middle of the day. The hotel had mainly Dutch and German guests with a smattering of British families didn’t really hear any noise at night apart from the odd young person coming back from the strip and clumsily getting into bed, and distant football songs from the bars locally. Now here is the ‘rub’ Majorca is currently besieged by protests from local residents complaining about over tourism. I’ve never been to Majorca before and I was aware of these protests, the Sunday before we arrived rubber bullets were fired by the police into a crowd of protesters. I was always hesitant to believe everything I read about the protests but having stayed in Majorca now it IS vastly overpopulated with tourists. There are high rise hotels, three streets deep for miles the Riu bravo had about 800 rooms. And all these people have to go somewhere if you venture out of the hotel any time day or night there are crowds and crowds of people it is claustrophobic. During our visit, the harbour had three large cruise ships in the port. With the tourists come obvious problems on my visit I saw German police and Dutch police patrolling the strip. I know how bad things have to be to get foreign Police to solve what I suspect is quite a large problem although mostly good humoured you’ll be sitting in a café and suddenly 150 football fans will descend upon the café singing songs that attracted the Police and the obvious stand-off that would ensue. This is totally in my opinion unsustainable and I am completely sided with the locals. There has to be tourism in these places but not at this level. It is ridiculous. I love the Spanish people. They’re so warm and friendly wherever you go but on this point I completely agree with them the tourist tax that we paid in our case €50 for five nights doesn’t even go to the locals it goes to the Spanish government that itself would pay for subsidised housing for young Spaniards. I Love Majorca but I won’t be back if nothing else to stand in solidarity with the locals which makes me sad, as there are parts of the island that are idilic.

Location of the hotel is close to the beach and close to lots of restaurants. Beach is lovely. Hotel restaurant for all inclusive food was very hit or miss. Sometimes it was good others it wasn’t great. The pools in the hotel were not as clean as we would have liked and they are smaller than they look on the pictures. The pools are surrounded my trees and there were leaves everywhere. Hotel room was good; nice bed, clean, good room service, bathroom was big, shower pressure could have been better. Balcony was nice. Our safe did lock us out several times and we had to get staff to come and fix it. Unfortunately they only serve beer or wine with meals and you can only have 3 all inclusive alcoholic drinks with meals. We were unhappy with the all inclusive food and drink and the pools but hotel staff were nice enough and room was clean and satisfactory. Area of hotel was good we spent a lot of time at beach and along the strip.