Lion Resorts Vacation Club review: Bad customer care 5

Cyprus – Capital Coast Resort December 08/January 09
Mr and Mrs Allen Perrin

Arrival Tuesday 23rd December 2008 approximately 5pm at Paphos airport.
Taxi to take us to the apartment was not there. Waited in the main entrance and a taxi driver eventually turned up holding a card with our name. He said one word “welcome”.
The taxi was dirty outside and in.

At Capital Coast Resort, were given a welcome letter from the Lion Resorts representative which invited us to a breakfast meeting in the morning, together with the key to Room 321, which the receptionist said had “a sea view”. The room was a two bedroom apartment/suite which we felt was much too big for our requirement. We returned to reception and asked about moving to a smaller room. Receptionist said she would have to speak to her operations manager and would get back to us. We were to go and wait in the room.

After nearly 2 hours waiting (during which time we noted there was no “welcome pack” in the room for us) Iris rang down to reception and asked what was happening about moving to another room. She was told nothing had been done about it because “a pump had broken and everyone was down there”. The receptionist called back about 10-15 minutes later to say nothing could be done about moving rooms until the next day.
We decided to sleep in the room without unpacking and meet with the Lion Resort representative in the morning. It was now almost 7.30pm. With still no “welcome pack” in the room, we decided to go down and see what we could buy in the mini-mart, which was supposed to be open until 8pm. We found the mini-mart closed. As we had not eaten since the in-flight meal, we decided to go to the hotel dining room to eat.
We felt the standard of the food was poor. The meal cost us 44 euros.

We returned to the room and found the “welcome pack” had arrived.
On closer inspection of the apartment, we found that in one bedroom, none of the lights worked, only some in the other bedroom worked and as the night went on, they went out until only one was left working. The toilet seat in one of the bathrooms was off. The water taps in the main en-suite bathroom was not fixed properly and swung round. The toilet flush-push in all both bathrooms were loose and not properly finished against the wall. The apartment had not been properly cleaned.
One of the supposedly luxury facilities was web access via the television. This did not work. We found the furniture in the lounge area uncomfortable – very hard – and there were no scatter cushions to make it softer. The noise of the lift going up and down– which was situated almost opposite the door to the apartment – could be heard continuously. This most definitely was not luxury accommodation.

Wednesday 24th December 9.30am
Met with Steve, the Lion Resort Representative at reception, who was a pleasant person. We suggested he come up to the apartment so we could explain how unhappy we were. On entering the room he could not understand why we had been put in such a large apartment. I suggested that we had been given one of the biggest rooms because we had complained strongly prior to our arrival about the short notice change of resort, and the management must have thought giving us one of the biggest rooms in the building would make us happy.

Steve took us downstairs to the Lion Resort offices within the building and introduced us to his Manager (Ian), who we repeated our complaints to. After some discussion, he arranged for us to view a smaller apartment, Room 207. As the room had very recently been vacated, it was in the middle of being cleaned. This room was of a much more suitable size, with one en-suite bedroom, shower room, smaller lounge and kitchen area. Again some of the bedroom lights did not work, there were no bedside lights for reading (only ceiling lights, those of which that worked were very dim)
The flush-push in both bathrooms was not properly finished to the walls and in the shower room the toilet seat was not fixed.

As the room was more suitable to our needs, we accepted the move to Room 207.
Steve said he would get the faults sorted out and have a reading light for the bedside brought up from the office.

As we had also discussed with Steve about car hire locally, he offered to take us into Paphos to a hire firm he knew and which would give us a good rate.

On our return with the hire car we collected our suitcases from Room 321 and moved to Room 207.

The repairs had not been done. We mentioned this to Steve’s Manager (Ian), who said that maintenance had been told and it would be done that day.

6pm 24th December – repairs still not done in room. No contact from Lion Resorts personnel at all.

25th December (Christmas Day)
Air condition not working – blowing out hot air all the time, whichever setting it was on.
After one shower taken in the separate bathroom, there was water on the floor – leaked from the shower cabinet which was not properly sealed.
The wash basins did not hold the water when plugged.
The expel-air units in both bathrooms did not work.

Again, the television internet facility did not work.

There were no instructions how to use the kitchen equipment – hob (which had touch key operation and was confusing) oven, cooker hood, microwave, dishwasher and washing machine). The lights above the cooker and the cooker hood did not work.
There were no oven gloves.

There was no welcome booklet with resort details.

The smoke detector suddenly started bleeping for no apparent reason, and stopped.

26th December – Steve the Lion Resort rep. waved to me as I sat on the balcony of the apartment - I acknowledged his wave. There was still no sign of repairs being done in the apartment.

2nd January 2009 – at approximately 08.40am all the electricity went down and came back on around 09.05am. When we rang reception they said that the electric in the whole resort had gone down.

Not long after this we had a telephone call from Steve the Lion Resort rep. inviting us to a meeting over lunch in the dining room the next day. This was the first contact from anyone from Lion Resorts since 24th December 2008

Saturday 3rd January2009 – repairs still not done. We met with Steve and had lunch we told him how unhappy we were and he had, since we last met read all the e-mails that had gone back and forth and could see why we were so disappointed.

He proceed to give us the sales pitch even knowing himself that it was a waste of time, (but that was his job). He showed us how we could take up the remaining two weeks of the package we had already brought etc. We also met one of is other managers (Peter) who only said to me after he had been told the situation, “ well it is not a year round resort and the weather was good and at least we had had a break in Cyprus”. I will say that I was not very impressed with either of Steve’s mangers that we meet.

Steve then told us that his manager would be prepared to give us the value of our flight and bring the total amount of £3000 and deducted it from the deal if we signed up to the package on offer. He said to go away and think about it and look at some of the places we could go to with our remaining 2 weeks he gave us his books to look through that evening and said to meet him for breakfast next morning.

Sunday 4th January 2009 - We met Steve at breakfast and after breakfast went down stairs to the Lion Resorts offices, we informed him that we had no intention of signing up to the full package and this did not come as a surprise to him. However once we had said that he could not get rid of us quick enough. From then until we left on Tuesday 6th January we did not have any further contact with anyone from Lion Resorts, apart from Steve telling me in passing that the taxi would pick us up from reception at 2:30pm. It was the same dirty taxi and taxi driver we had when we arrived this time he did not say anything played his music loud all the way to the airport opened the boot and walked off to collect some other poor sole.

We were lead to believe that we were going to be staying in a 4/5 star luxury suite in a very high quality resort, what we actually got was an inferior quality, lifeless concrete box. This has been the worst accommodation that we have stayed in for over 15 years.

The e-mails before we left indicate that we were not happy about being moved at such short notice, despite having been told before we booked our flights that we were going to be staying at the Cypria Maris Resort which is where we had originally booked.

If we had been shown the Capital Coast Resort at the time we would not have brought and paid for the package we have. We brought the package we did because of the location and the suite we had been shown and the fact that we could have it at the time of year we wanted.

I feel that we should have been given the opportunity to have pulled out of the package we had purchased and had our money refunded, but no instead we were mislead by Lion Resorts to take the holiday at the Capital Coast resort that was far from the standard we had been lead to believe it would be, in a location that we did not really want to be in and ended up having what has turned out to be the worst holiday experience we have had in 15 years. Along with being nearly £3000 down on the whole unpleasant experience.