Hotel Riu Karamboa - All Inclusive - Adults Only

Any review is just a personal opinion. And this is mine… Pros: Very close to the Airport so a short transfer. Beautiful lobby/bar area, plenty of seating. Other areas including rooms nicely decorated and fairly well maintained. Lovely well manicured gardens. Several pools to choose from 2 with a swim up. Beautiful beach (always loungers available). Staff very hard working, we personally always found them to be polite and helpful. Entertainment of some sort every day and evening. TIP. Look at the big screen in Reception to see what’s on each day (or the App), we missed lots by not looking. Indoor & outdoor seating for dining available. 3 evening bars available + indoor air conditioned Sports Bar. Main Restaurant is open till 9:30 so you can have a quiet meal. Several self-service wine/beer/soft drinks dispensers around. Cons: A big hotel with approx 950 rooms = a lot of guests. No lifts- you have to take your own cases upon check-out. Not enough loungers around the pools, ‘sunbed wars’ VERY much a thing. Main restaurant has a lot of choice, but it’s pretty much the same every night - no themed or special evenings. And it gets VERY busy with people walking in front of you all the time. Personally I worried the food was not hot enough, and literally 100’s of people using the same serving spoons etc. Drinks are unbranded and taste diluted. Most cocktails at the pool bars are pre mixed and very sweet. Ask for an extra shot if you want to be able to taste alcohol. No finesse to the cocktails- too many people to serve I guess. Lots of flys at the pool bars, crawling all over the self-service drinks dispenser. Themed restaurants are hard to get into, if you fail on-line (not everyone has the App) try begging at reception. Our room towels were well worn and often smelled a bit odd/not very fresh. The Evening entertainment is so-so, but the staff do try hard. The Friday Neon& White parties are repetitive. People are bused in from other hotels so it gets supa busy. The swim-up bars are like a Club 18-30 hotel in the afternoons, and the water gets suspiciously cloudy! Overall a nice enough hotel/holiday (if you exclude the upset tummies 4 out of 6 of us had). Is it a 5* - No more 3.5-4. Would I return - No. But try it and make your own mind up.

It’s an amazing hotel. Staff are very friendly you need to plan when you go for your meal to avoid the busy times

What can say other than amazing! Accommodation was excellent and clean. The resort service was brilliant, the food amazing! The choice was excellent and the quality was very high. The presentation was first class. The effort behind the scenes to provide this standard was absolutely stunning. Not a bad word to say about the resort or anything. The rooms were very good and cleaned daily to a very high standard.

Excellent apart from the 70’s style “towels on Sunbeds” at pool… After 7.00am there was nothing left. And they were mostly unoccupied till late morning. That me and we wool not go there again.

We spent two weeks here in September, partially based on reviews that ultimately turned out to be either fake or created by visitors with rose tinted glasses. Room; We upgraded to a swim up room, which for us saved the holiday, as we spent most of our time in our pool. The room was ok, a decent size and the bathroom had a good size shower. However, on arrival the fridge was empty and the optics had not been replenished, but the RIU app worked well for requests. However, we did have to make several requests and eventually go to reception to have the problem of an army of ants crawling all over the bed resolved as this was not seen as a major issue and was going to be left until the next day to be looked at! It’s a hot country and it’s expected that you might see cockroaches, but not in the restaurants, unfortunately, we did, the same restaurant and twice! You would not expect to see a cook using his hands to transfer scrambled egg from one nearly empty container to another at any hotel let alone a so called 5* hotel, but we did at the continental breakfast. Same restaurant also put out past its best food, such as cucumber which was black, and brown pineapple 🤢 Generally speaking, the food was very average, and repetitive, also this is the only all inclusive that we have been to that didn't have any theme nights, we stuck to the carvery most nights as it seemed the best option out of a large but poor selection on offer. Again unexpected for a 5* hotel was the fact that the restaurants were mainly self service, the one positive was that the plates were cleared away very quickly. Restaurants; There are 3 restaurants, only 1 of which is a-la-carte. The Kulinarium is the only restaurant that is not self service and that you order from a menu, the food here was quite nice, the Asian is the worst, with the food being so unauthentic and poorly cooked it’s laughable, the Italian, what can I say apart from no lasagne, no meatballs 🤷‍♀️😂 also both of these restaurants are just smaller buffet restaurants. All the restaurants including the main buffet are too small and inadequate, given the hotel has over 900 rooms, making dining a very cramped experience. The staff vary from friendly and helpful, to pretty rude and disinterested. Pools; Avoid, we have never seen so many people and sun loungers in such a small area. And what can be said about the swim up bar, apart from lots of stools in water with drinkers not moving out the water at all during the day for any reason 🤮 Grounds; Nice, but a lot of bare wasted space, could look so much better, far from the 5* experience. To sum up, we had a relaxing holiday, due to having upgraded to a swim up room, if we hadn’t, we would have tried to get an early flight home, this hotel falls way short of being a 5* star experience, it’s at best 3*, which makes it an expensive holiday, plus you have the added joy of sitting on a cramped plane for over six hours, uncomfortable, with no inflight entertainmen

Wonderful holiday from start to finish - flights via Birmingham were on time, Riu Karamboa excellent! Staff, food, cleanliness were fantastic. Only gripe is lack of sunbeds around pools unless you’re willing to set the alarm for 6:30 & reserve with towels.