My experience at FERGUS Carema Splash: a deeply disappointing family holiday.

Changing rooms did not end the disruption.

After the room change, each return to E-101 brought another practical problem. Whichever direction we approached from, reaching it involved approximately 30 steps.

With a pushchair and two very young children, this was not a route we simply noticed once. We repeated it every time we went back for a nap, a change of clothes or something we had left behind.

Across the road, the all-inclusive experience stopped at the gate.

The hotel gave us a code to use the pool in the private residential community across the road. Residents told us that the hotel owns apartments there and gives its guests access. Once inside, however, there were no toilets and no drinks.

A glass of water meant leaving the pool and walking at least five minutes in the sun to the self-service point we could use. With two small children, even a basic need became another small expedition.

What our ‘all-inclusive’ actually included.

The clearest way to explain the package is to separate what we paid, what it included, when it was available and what still cost extra.

Water produced the same sense of limitation. There were dispensers inside the buffet, but outside it the only freely accessible self-service point we could use was a single dispenser. From the water-slide pool, reaching it took us at least five minutes on foot in the sun.

During our stay, we found no option to buy bottled water at the hotel. At that outside point, water could only be drunk from the reusable plastic cups provided. They were stacked while still wet and did not smell clean; using them felt disgusting to us.

I also recorded several wasps flying and landing around the nozzles at that same outdoor drinks station.

Watch video 04 in this chapter↓

Even mealtimes began to feel like a deadline.

Breakfast was advertised until 10:30 and lunch until 15:00. At those times we were still allowed in, but the service was already being shut down: the drinks machines were switched off and staff began clearing everything away.

About ten minutes later, the lights were switched off. In practice, arriving within the published hours did not mean having time to sit down and eat normally, particularly with two children aged one and three.

For a family, the difference matters. The stated closing time felt less like the last moment to enter and more like the moment by which we were expected to have finished.

The food itself struck us as greasy, with little variety from one day to the next, very sweet desserts and presentation that we found poor. The breakfast cereals were stale and had gone soft.

There was one bread toaster for the whole dining room. The milky coffee and juices came from powdered-mix machines; the yoghurts also seemed to us to have been reconstituted from powder.

For water, there were two dispensers in the dining room and we had to carry it to the table one glass at a time. With two young children, even getting water for everyone became a succession of trips.

Between diners, we did not see the tables disinfected; we saw them wiped with a damp cloth. Highchairs were not brought to us either: we had to find and collect one ourselves.

The food itself was, in my opinion, one of the greatest disappointments of the stay. We thought it was so poor that we did not go to dinner on a single evening, despite having paid for full board on an all-inclusive basis.

We had paid for three main meals a day and ended up not using one of them at all. In my opinion, neither the food nor this dining-room experience matched the standard I expected from a four-star hotel or the price we paid.

Rest also depended on finding a place.

At busy times, the pool and dining areas felt crowded to us. Sometimes we struggled to find loungers or seats together for a meal.

The noise matched the crowding. Both the dining room and the pool areas felt particularly noisy and chaotic to us during our stay.

Hiring a pool towel cost €10 per towel. Clean replacements were available only three days a week and within set hours. On the other days, we had to take the used towels back to our room and reuse them, a system we found unnecessarily inconvenient.

Some of the poolside loungers had numerous bird droppings visible across their surfaces. When occupancy rose, the problem was not only finding several together: at times, finding any available loungers became part of the daily routine.

A family holiday is already full of small logistics. Queues and the repeated search for space added yet more of them.

By then, I had started photographing what I was seeing.

During the stay I photographed the condition of parts of the water-play structures. The images below show visible rust-coloured corrosion on railings, posts, brackets and fixings; worn coatings; exposed or protruding metal pieces; dark deposits; staining; and material apparently secured with plastic cable ties.

Taken together, the water park and parts of its supporting structures looked aged and in need of more maintenance to me. That impression came from what I could see as a guest; it is not a technical assessment of the slides.

It was not one isolated photograph. The same pattern appeared in different shared areas.

What concerned us about the shared areas was not one image in isolation, but encountering similar signs in different spaces that we used every day.

In the pool-area toilet, I filmed dirt and what I considered a clear lack of cleaning. The soap dispenser produced no soap when I tried it, nor did it on any occasion during our five-night stay. Every hotel toilet we used also gave off a very unpleasant smell. Some taps or fittings appeared damaged. These were shared facilities used by families throughout the day, so their condition mattered to us.

Beside the pool, we observed stagnant water in or beneath the artificial turf that did not dry out during our stay. The area gave off an unpleasant smell and, in our opinion, felt deeply unhygienic.

At one pool, missing mosaic tiles and displaced or broken sections of drain grating were also clearly visible. To me, they were further visible signs of insufficient maintenance.

On other daily routes, I photographed a tube-slide opening closed with barrier tape, heavy condensation on a food-cabinet window, used reusable cups, worn and darkened artificial turf, a broken outdoor receptacle containing cigarette ends, and weathered timber with a protruding metal fastener. Taken together, the toilets, surfaces, resting areas and visibly deteriorated elements felt to us like a recurring pattern of neglect, not a single unfortunate moment.