Hotel Cordial Mogan Playa

This hotel is everything you would want in a holiday hotel. The welcome you receive is wonderful, the service consistently excellent and the staff are all delightful. The hotel is spotless, the rooms are pleasant and the gardens and public areas all beautifully maintained.. The area where the hotel is located is very peaceful and the resort is charming. The main restaurant can get very busy at breakfast time but staff seem to manage it all very well and the choice was vast. Evening meals are in two sittings and you have a choice of times. The choice again is varied and there is something for everyone. The staff, although busy, seem to have time for everyone. There are two pools, one with activities and one quiet pool area.

Just spent one of the most relaxing weeks of our lives at the glorious Cordial Mogan Playa Hotel.

We could not fault this hotel except perhaps for too much delicious food, it really was superb, very varied - although buffet style, but you have never seen a buffet like this. A delightfully designed restaurant with trees, plants and waterfalls surrounding. The food is set all around the restaurant and there was never any queuing. You could eat as much as you wanted and you could return to the buffet as often as you wished.

We actually booked half board plus which meant our drinks at dinner (or lunch) were included. We calculated we saved about about £20 a night by booking this up front.

Right from the moment we arrived, eleven hours late at 3 in the morning because of a plane delay, we were made to feel so welcome. We were offered food and drinks - beer, wine, champagne, soft, anything we wanted.

Check in was quick, smooth and efficient courtesy of a very friendly (and sympathetic) receptionist.

We booked a suite which was lovely, we even had our own little tropical garden, as we were on the ground floor, with personal sunbeds. The room was spotless, cleaned every day and bins emptied and towels changed twice a day, if necessary, the second time when the beds were turned down at night and chocolate left for us!

The ambiance, furnishings, gardens, rooms and staff are the best we have experienced in a long, long time.

The free Wi-fi was very good and the hotel have just had fiber optic cabling put in which, when connected by the Canarian phone company, will vastly increase the speed.

The grounds are spectacular with streams and waterfalls, trees, plants and flowers everywhere - inside and out. In fact the reception and foyer resembles the tropical Dome at the Eden Project! Beautiful.

The hotel never felt busy or crowded, even though there are 480 rooms, it is designed so well that you are hardly aware of anyone else.

There is a passeo or walkway directly outside the hotel leading to the village, beach and harbour. It is a ten minute stroll or 5 minutes if you walk through the hotel grounds and exit through one of the gates.

Don't miss the market in the village and all around the harbour on a Friday - also the Hotel's 'behind the scenes' tour is on a Friday - very interesting.

Fabulous holiday and will definitely return - with our returners loyalty card - they think of everything!

This is a great hotel, modern, but distinctive with great food and facilities. This is our third visit and each has been good. The hotel is immaculately clean and the staff friendly. We spent most of our days swimming in one of the two large pools or lounging around. The little port of Mogan is only a few hundred yards away through a secure gate. The only reason not to give the hotel 5 stars, is its a little quite. There is evening hotel entertainment in the hotel and some nice resturants in Mogan, bit for more life its a 20 minute drive to Purto Rico

I don't really understand all those "fantastic" reviews. This hotel is just average. There isn't really anything special.

But to get to the point:

GOOD THINGS:

- free wireless internet (although only outside, not in rooms but still good and reliable)

- wonderful and well kept gardens and pools

- warm water in pools and nice jacuzzis

- impressive reception hall

AVERAGE:

- rooms (very basic)

- service (staff is generally ok with few exceptions)

- size of the pools (they are NOT huge as somebody mentioned - sometimes very crowded and you can't really swim)

- entertainment

- view from the rooms (nothing really special - there is ugly supermarket next to the hotel, few buildings and some empty dirt field)

- you have to walk 10min to the beach and town centre

BELOW AVERAGE:

- you have to pay for the safe (tiny safe anyway)

- you have to pay for almost everything (tennis court, bowling, pool table (1 broken and another one was failing also))

- food (apart from few things like fresh fried eggs or fish the food is terrible and very basic)

Few examples: 5min eggs turned out to be burnt and solid inside, melted ice creams always the same 4 flavours, cold fries, out dated bread etc The food was almost always the same, tasteless and cold, drinks are not included for lunch and dinner. The choice of the food is not really great, very limited to few things.

- you have to choose sitting for a dinner which is strange

- you are assigned to a table for a dinner but not for a breakfast (funny rules) - new people coming in had to stand and wait for assigned table (while there were always plenty of free tables anyway)

- there are strict rules about dressing for a dinner! It is not a restaurant! It is a buffet with rubbish food. Honestly, chicken nuggets are better in macdonalds. Yes! Chicken nuggets, this is the food they are serving.

- drink prices - you will pay 2.20 euro for a small water or cola (in a supermarket 20m away from the hotel the same water 0.50euro). I can see now why they are not offering any drink for a dinner for free (half board/full board).

- rooms walls are very thin and if you have noisy visitors next door you won't sleep

- smell of the sewage on the balcony every morning and evening

- rubbish old TV which will hurt your eyes after few minutes watching

- patches of gravel in some places around the pool. I don't know who was such an idiot to do that. It hurts when you walk on it and it messes the pool area and the pool itself.

It seems that they want to get extra money on everything. We had to check out from our room because our flight was scheduled at 2am at night (this is how we booked through First Choice, it is not what we planned, this is FC schedule). They did offer our room for 'longer' but for extra 30 euro! I wouldn't mind if the room was booked for somebody else but just for extra 6 hours 30euro? We wouldn't even sit in the room.

The hotel is still nice but totally overpriced and overrated on tripadvisor! 94% ?! Joke.

This is a good place for german pensioners because 80% of the visitors are from Germany. If you come here for 2 weeks and don't want to sit everyday at the pool you better rent a car and go for a ride around the island because in this town there isn't much to do.

Overall the hotel is not that bad but not as good as all those reviews here.

If you really want to go there, don't go with full board. It is a waste of money!

VERY BIG MINUS for FIRST CHOICE here. Our transfer from the hotel to the airport took 3 hours! They had to pick up all those people on the way to the airport.

BTW

It is not 300m from the beach but 600m

Nothing to add, if I had to complain, the Hotel Cordial Mogan Playa is a little distance from the resort for those who aren't so good on their feet but that is being really picky as it's only a couple of hundred yards. We stayed for a week in 2006 in a Junior Suite with my partner and her mother, the suite was terrific as we had a floor each, saved Mum in law from my snoring!! Liked the hotel so much that we go back this Saturday for 2 weeks