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20. 08. 09. - 10:00

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20. 08. 09. - 10:00

Black Sea gets black marks as golden sands lose their sparkle

Romanian Times

by David Rogers

When it comes to holiday experiences, there can be few more miserable places to end up at than the Romanian Black Sea coast as David Rogers found out when he tested a resort for the Romanian Times. His account follows.

I read with interest that offers for the Romanian government's week at the seaside were likely to be oversubscribed. The subsidised "Week at the Seaside" stays mean that visitors can spend a week in a four-star hotel for €100.

Having recently experienced the tender loving care of a Romanian four-star beach hotel, I believe €100 would be too much for a week.

I decided to stay at the four-star Amiral Hotel in Mamaia after they offered six nights for the price of five, making the cost just under €450.

The difficulties started from the moment I tried to get into the hotel, with the access ramps for luggage and presumably disabled people permanently blocked by cars and even the stairs to the hotel cordoned off by a ring of cars - the no-parking signs were totally ignored. In fact, no sooner had I parked my car but it too was sealed off by another car.

In my room, the bathroom had not been cleaned, and I had to get the maids to change the sheets twice because they were covered with curly black hairs. Even after I had had the second set of sheets changed, I saw the hairs were still there - which did not say much for the laundry service. It explained why the complimentary bathing robes had spots of blood on the inside.

The shower had no doors but that didn’t make the bathroom any wetter, as every time I used it or switched on the tap in the sink, the floor was flooded by stinky water from the drain hole in the floor.

Only the reception staff spoke English, and every day they promised the Internet was going to be fixed without actually checking anything. One got the impression that "it will be done tomorrow" was the standard refrain until a guest finally left at the end of his stay.

In the hotel swimming pool, large chunks of blue paint blocked filters, and every morning an overweight man threw tablets and bottles of a substance into it that left a white froth on the water. It was still crowded every day, however, as the pool was also used by other hotels in the area that belong to the same group - the S.C. Unita Turism S.A. They obviously wanted to get value for their investment.

The beach was only a short walk away, and it cost 15 lei - around three Euros -- to reserve a sun lounger. Strangely, on some days the water was so blocked with seaweed you couldn't see more than a centimetre -- and on other days it was completely clear.

When I visited the area last year, there were tractors that dragged the beach each day to clear litter from the sand after the sun loungers had been moved. This year, the tractors only dragged the sea front, and the sun loungers were not moved. Instead, local officials engaged armies of young people to go around waking up sunbathers and handing them about 20 leaflets explaining -- in Romanian -- why they should not litter the beach. At the end of the day, most of the leaflets had joined the rest of the litter.

At the restaurant I went to on my first night, I ordered catfish - they obviously didn't expect that I would notice that what was served was cod, probably because it was hidden under a layer of charcoal-black flesh, and there was just a small amount of white meat in the middle.

There was a passable restaurant close to the hotel called the Captain Cook that, despite the half-decent food and friendly staff, was always relatively empty. The reason was that every evening, if one hadn't left by a certain time, copious amounts of a noxious, foul-smelling substance bubbled out of a concrete drain at the side of the terrace and flooded the sand. Some considerate person had dug parts of the sand away so that, instead of flooding into the restaurant, it went downhill towards a children's play area.

Next to that, there was a rusting waterslide in a swimming pool that impressively seemed to have more blue paint than the one at the four-star hotel had -- but it also had lots of green water and stray dogs around it.

There was a building site filled with litter and mechanical diggers and surrounded by two-year-old grand-opening signs for the nearby five-star hotel Vega, all those charming sites, of course, within a 500-metre walk of my hotel.

It all seems rather ironic that in the middle of it all, McDonald's was sponsoring a football tournament with large posters explaining in English "I'm Loving It".

Certainly the people promoting the McDonald's festival were more considerate than some of the other locals. Anybody attempting to relax on the beach had to put up every five minutes with somebody walking past with a megaphone selling either concert tickets, boat rides or something similar. The only considerate ones were the McDonald's girls and boys in their McDonald's T-shirts and megaphones, who walked up and down flirting with each other and never once mentioning the football tournament.

If you are hoping to end up with a better hotel, my experiences to date suggest you will be unlikely to have much luck. I have tried several other hotels such as the Hotel Pelican, where booking a room in advance guarantees you a view of the car park and a swimming pool attendant who delights in shouting and using his whistle at the slightest misdemeanour. There is generally apathy towards guests -- once they have reeled you in, they seem to care very little about whether you're going to come back next year, and I can't help thinking that the fact half the sun loungers were empty this year compared to those I saw last year was due to more than the credit crunch.

Which is a shame because the beach underneath all the cigarette butts and ice cream wrappers really is made of golden sand, and every time I've been there, although the wind is sometimes strong, it is nearly always sunny. The water is pleasant, and, although the vast majority of people working there don't deserve their jobs, there are exceptions such as the chap at the Olympic bar outside the hotel who spoke excellent English and was always happy to have a chat and share a joke in between serving  excellent coffee and great Romanian beer.

Romanians need to learn that the best advertising they can have will be the small number of tourists they do manage to attract. Prices are still low even when you add in the rip-off factor - cocktails and main courses at around three to four pounds each are still a good buy. All they need to do is to get the message out there and learn that when they get visitors they need to treat them well and make them feel special.

I don't expect much more than a bit of sun and a chance to relax on holiday, but I think it's fair to say that clean sheets and a chance to doze for more than five minutes without a megaphone going off and to eat my dinner and smell only the food and not the contents of the drains are not unreasonable additional requests.

David Rogers stayed at Hotel Amiral in August this year (2009).

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