Hotel Garden Istra Plava Laguna

Just returned from renovated Hotel Garden Istra, been there second time. Hotel is great, renovation is well done. Rooms are modern and comfort, everything is focused on kids and there are really a lot of activities for them. Just to write few - modern kids club for all ages, lunch for kids included, new 3 big slides, new mid slides, a lot of pools, excellent game room, completely new trampoline park, astronomy day, guitar lessons, etc, etc...... My daughter (10) was vary happy with all activities and we did't make it to visit all of them for 5 days. But it comes with a price - almost 1.600 guests at the same time (including 3 annex buildings - apartments) means a extreme busy restaurants, pools. You can get beach towel only till 10am, you will have to wake up very early if you want to "reserve" your parasol near to the pool...... Beach in front of the hotel is located 200m from the hotel and it is sandy and very shallow (if you want to swim you have to walk 50m to get depth which is ok for swimming).

Travelled with my son who turned 9 during our 1 week stay. Not only did they arrange a birthday table for brekkie, decorated it and added some gifts from the hotel - even a small cake - but the staff is throughout exceptionally friendly and helpful! Any questions regarding possible restaurants, postcards or have been answered professionally and very, very friendly and patient, even during extremely busy times such as check out time. When I have had a problem with my vehicle, a patient man from housekeeping came quickly and fixed my car so I could use it safely to return back home (an almost 500km drive). I have noticed that the lady, Ms Natalia, at the entrance of the restaurant seemed to be there every day. The reason for it is that she's the only one on that particular position who can speak English. Either she needs a huge raise or a second English speaker needs to be hired! The buffer is okay, nothing special...but again, the people working there made the diff: they work hard to keep everything clean and refill empty platters asap. My son loved the mascot Pepi, a red seahorse, which came into the lobby every morning. Even though the water park opened the day we left, they offer different sports from 16:00h to 17:00h daily for the kids. The location may not be directly at the beach, but the walk underneath beautiful trees ain't too shabby. My son and I would like to specifically thank a few staff members: - Natalia from the restaurant entrance - Katarina also from the restaurant - the female "Saalchef" who arranged the birthday table - the friendly man from housekeeping who helped fixing the car - Nurija from the reception, always friendly and patient - Silvia from the reception, also always friendly and helpful - Emil from the reception, also very friendly

The hotel is overrated and doesn't deserve four stars that it has. The food was the worst, we arrived at the hotel at dinner time and we were starving, so we wanted a nice dinner and let me tell you we aren't a picky dinner if we had to eat something we would eat it and we also expected something good from a four star hotel, but the food had poor options alot of it was cold and you couldn't have drinks at meals if you didn't pay extra for a braclete that alows you to get drinks or that you had to pay for them. The room's were fine but the walls were verry thin and you could hear everything (one night we even heard someone having sexsual intercourse), the air was horrible we all were dizzy from it, there are also little cracks in between the door and door frame so you can see thought it. The hotel service was nice the hausekeeping were really trying. Depending on the amount of guests in the hotel the pool could be bigger on shaped diffrent. And for the cherry on top when we checked out we found out we have to pa for a parking spot.

We arrived at 21:05 and we couldnt get dinner for which we paid for. Dinner time was until 21:00 and they said that we can go somewhere near the hotel to grab some pizza or burger. Every time we did a late check in some other hotels we could get dinner, ever if the check in was after midnight. This is a big minus for hotel.

Retirement home style hotel. Poor food (breakfast a bit better) average service, Rooms need service and refurbishment (electricity fallingout every five minutes... Limited usage of hotel services and different than described... Definitely bad price performance!