H10 Rubicon Palace

For our Easter holidays in Lanzarote we chose, for the first time an H10 hotel: the H10 Rubicon Palace, a five-star resort, for its design, family amenities and location in Playa Blanca in the south of the island.

The hotel is grandiose (that pool!), beautiful, well designed and built. At first sight, you can tell that it is meant to cater mass tourism. There are six restaurants, six bars, five outdoor pools and a huge indoor spa and pool (the Despacio Thalasso center), a game arcade, a cinema theatre, a daisy kids’ club and multisport courts, but... (ah yes, there is often a but when you stay at a five-star resort in Europe, especially in Spain) even if the outside is beautiful, what's inside does not always match.

In our opinion, a five-star luxury resort must be excellent at every level, especially the service. Unfortunately, in this area, we are rarely fully satisfied in Europe. The H10 Rubicon Palace is poorly managed. The rooms are not as spick-and-span as you would expect of this category of resorts, the in-room safe is very old and too small, our kid noticed a lot of empty plastic glasses, bowls, forks and knives lying by the side of the beautiful main pool. We alerted the Office Manager about it, but it took them three days to clean it up. Another example: when we asked the hotel staff at the lobby to help us contact a Covid-test center so we could do our PCR-test for our flight back to France, they simply gave us a list of medical centers, we had to do it ourselves. When we arrived at the hotel the first day with our rental car and two big and heavy pieces of luggage, nobody was there to welcome us, no bell boy to take care of our luggage. We had to do it ourselves. Breakfast buffet was OK, dinner buffet not so much. Not acceptable.

Of course there is Covid and the place is probably less staffed than usual, we know that, but there are also less guests to take care of plus the price we paid is not much lower than usual. Management blamed Covid and only Covid. Same song we heard last year in Portugal and Spain. The root of the problem is much simpler: it is a Management problem and it goes way back in some European countries, way before Covid, which is just a convenient excuse now.

We think that European hotels and resorts top management should go on seminar in Asia to see how luxurious hotel brands like Shangri-La, Mandarin Oriental or Six Senses manage their hotels and their staff over there. That would be a wake-up call. Well, hopefully.

H10 Rubicon Palace

Urbanización Montaña Roja

35570, Las Palmas, Spain

Tel : +34 928 51 85 00

www.h10hotels.com/en/lanzarote-hotels