Sunny Beach, Europa Hotel

If you're going to go to sunny beach give hotel Europa a miss.

The Europa Hotel in Bulgaria is clean, and the staff are helpful. A special mention to the pool bar staff, who were always happy to help. The food there is of a good variety, and the service was excellent.

It's a nice place to be, and we will return in 2006.

Lets face it Sunny Beach does exactly what it says on the tin, it's a man made resort catering for almost exclusively English and German tourists so there is full English breakfasts and Schnitzel on every corner. The beach is beautiful and very clean, the street vendors are incredibly pushy and don't even think about changing money on the street unless it has the crown symbol on it.

The Europa hotel is a complete mutt from outside a giant concrete block, inside it would have been described as opulent in the seventies lots of glass, marble and wood, but it does feel very dated. The rooms however are better than ok for a £70 per week half board hotel and the cleaners were spot on, they even invited us to their end of season party and put on cartloads of free food and drink and even gave us presents.

Special mention must also go to Garia behind the bar who put up with 3 inebriated Yorkshiremen better than anyone at home could have.

All in all good clean and cheap.

All in all we (4 adults aged from 27 - 79 years, and 2 kids 4 & 8 years old) had a great holiday at the Europa Hotel, Sunny beach, in Bulgaria. There is something to keep everyone amused if you go looking for it. There was no evening entertainment in the hotel, but we pretty much made our own anyway. The hotel was clean, but I've found that Bulgarians are pretty clean anyway, and it's so refreshing to not find litter everywhere.

The office manager wasn't very helpful on our last day. Earlier in the week we had arranged our room to be extended to 6.00pm, as our flight wasn't until 2.55am, with our pick up being 12.55am. However, when we came to check-out, the receptionist (who didn't cope very well with stress levels),informed us that we hadn't paid the additional 20 Lev's! I can assure you we had, but I was not provided with a receipt. Anyway after much arguing backwards and forwards, the reps getting involved, and the receptionist near to tears, the charge was finally waivered by the receptionist, as she couldn't take much more. I'd probably go again on a budget holiday, as everything was easily accessible.

Hotel Europa is located at the southern end of Sunny beach and can only be described as a concrete block. Our room was located on the 11th of 14 floors. The room has a tiled floor which added to the problems of the noise which was constant both from outside and inside. The hotel bars were open 24/7. The floors are serviced by three lifts which again were in constant use (max 4 people) our max wait was 15mins at which point the stairs were starting to look inviting. We stayed on a B/B basis (good choice) as the breakfast was not very good (I'm being polite) we also discovered the quality of the food for lunch and dinner was poor as well. However it's not all doom and gloom. The staff are superb very friendly and very good. Our room was spotless and the cleaner (god bless her) changed our towels every day and sheets every other day. The hotel has an Olympic size swimming pool which is spotless the pool bar is great and very cheap. The hotel is next to the beach which has superb facilities. As we were on a night flight we asked to keep our room and were refused but allowed to use the showers in the Gym area (better off in the sea) so we had from 1200noon to 0100 to wait.

Sunny Beach we will visit again the Hotel Europa NEVER.

Sunny Beach, Europa Hotel - See Above.