Catalonia Royal La Romana

We just had an amazing dinner at Thalass restaurant . Maria Rijo was our server and she guided our culinary experience to a high level

A very nice hotel, the rooms are nice and clean, staff is very friendly. However there are some aspects we were not happy with. The beach is nice but small and there is a daily battle to obtain chairs under an umbrella. In the end we tried to get a good place as early as 6 or 7 in the morning. Apparently there were complains and they started to remove things that were left on the chairs. Not a nice experience. Also the hotel is located too far from the next village and we would have liked to leave the hotel n the evening and see some stores or stop for a coffee. Not possible. The food was excellent and one had the possibility to dine in the sister hotel. That way one had different options. Still we wished the food election would have been more local. We had a very good stay but I do not believe that we would return.

All in all this is a beautiful hotel and a lovely place . Room was lovely ( junior suite with pool) and really clean. Air con amazing . Loved the wrist band with combined key .. it’s the simple things :-) WiFi great . A little confusing regarding restaurants as TUI description says buffet breakfast and lunch in Thalassa ( the main restaurant) but not open at lunch time. We found the main restaurant Taino for the buffet which was lovely . All other restaurants are bookable on an app . The best by far was Asian (Tao Cat) , the food there was lovely. Italian was nice but steak restaurant not great ( poor quality meat). I was unfortunate enough to get food poisoning which I believe was from some fish in the main à la carte restaurant ( it wasn’t that hot and I was immediately bloated even though I didn’t finish it .. poorly for the next couple of days ) . I wish we had realised about the main buffet sooner as we would have eaten there more. It also says on TUI website that long trousers are required for men .. clearly not the case . Main pool lovely , beach lovely but be warned about access … a big dip on the beach and ocean is gorgeous but It is rough .. but no seaweed and clean and lovely . There are signs about reserving beds but no one takes any notice unfortunately. We were up early and able to get decent beds (by sitting on them) but still impossible to get an ocean view because of others putting towels out and not occupying until much later. I wish I was tough enough to remove said towels . Staff at the hotel are lovely , big shout out to Jessica who looked after us brilliantly . Bit of a language barrier , so any Spanish helps but they all try hard . We took local currency because I read that staff preferred this in tips but was hard to get change for bigger notes at the hotel so would recommend taking US dollars . We didn’t see our rep all holiday but I believe she was there once or twice and available on a chat. Didn’t affect us . So overall a lovely holiday. I’m lucky to have visited.

We really did enjoy our 14 days stay here. The hotel is beautiful and offers a good range of entertainment both in the day and evening. We tried all the restaurants on site and most of them were very nice. Our favourite being Thalassa and Bloved. You do have to book the restaurants via the app and they can get booked up quickly. Big shout out to Rolando in Bloved who did a great job of looking after us and especially Berenice who kept delivering the refreshing drinks at the Bar Aqua during the day. Both are a credit to the hotel. The beach was stunning however it is extremely difficult to get a place in the shade as people reserve them as early as 6am, I feel the hotel should address this. One thing we did find was that some staff could be borderline rude to guests, this is simply not expected from a 5 star hotel and there was definitely a language barrier that could make asking for the simplest of things quite hard, however both my husband and myself tried our best to speak Spanish as much as we could. Would we come back again? Probably not, however we did enjoy our holiday.

The good… Well appointed huge room. Housekeeping very efficient thank you Milena for looking after us. All around the hotel areas the grounds, pools were beautifully maintained. Thalassa breakfast was very good, egg station plus everything else in abundance. Staff very helpful and friendly did help that my husband spoke Spanish or could have been a bit difficult at times. The only one very unwelcoming was the maitre d lady in Tao Cat. Totally different atmosphere on her night off. Drinks and drink waiting staff all excellent. Not so good…. Yep 5.30 in the morning towels out on the beach. If you was not at the front shaded beds then yes you didn’t get an ocean view but more for us you got wafted all day with cigarette and worse cigar smoke absolutely filthy. This was all over in the hotel to the point of some evenings we had to move inside. Food was awful pre cooked not re heated properly. Husband was really ill after eating a tiny amount of fish from the buffet. At Thalassa one lunch time he was served raw chicken. We spoke to a few people who had been sick too also hotel next door. After this we were nervous to eat anything asking for it to be hot as mostly served cold. We found that the quality of the meat was slightly better at the adults only restaurant but even that was hit and miss same plate next day tough and gristly. We really struggled to find anything apart from breakfast that we enjoyed and was well cooked. I asked for some vegetables one evening in Thalassa to be told no sorry we don’t serve vegetables. Tui transfer flight at 5pm picked up at 12! Ridiculous. All said we had a nice time, beach was lovely but no chance of any bed with shade after 8am. Would not return.