Radisson Blu Malta Golden Sands Resort

We bought a timeshare and were told all good things about having this.

We were given a free week anywhere in the world that sounds wonderful, but try using it and ask for help to get through their system and forget it. We were told would be easy to sell on if we ever wanted to. Forget it. Paid the fee for them to sell not a whisper.

Now have a letter we can hand it back for free to them. So the thousands paid in cash for it would be lost. Talk about bl…y cheek. Sounds good, sold well, but try getting out of it.

You pay thousands for timeshare and then maintenance fee, which actually would buy a holiday, plus you have to pay for flights and transfers so now we feel this is poor value.

Our first time visited Malta. Arrived at the hotel, checking in was smooth.

The room seemed a bit tired, to begin with, but we were not fussy.

The day went by, things started to go wrong. First we found the bin lid wasn’t working, had to use hand to lift up the lid – disgusting; then we found the shower mixer was broken – either only cold water or hot water came out, no decent shower; while we wanted to grab something from its mini bar we found the fridge was empty though mini bar menu listed many items.

We had to ask to put us in a different room which had a working shower.

Many other little things clearly showed the hotel was not up to its 4/5 star standard. E.g. drinking machine in the gym had a broken tap, signpost badly done deli signpost was showing to a different floor, one of the concierge staff was showing “can’t be bothered” attitude when we asked him about local information.

First time here and last time too.

Paid to stay at the Radisson for £99 for a week’s stay via a Home show in London. We were told that we would have to attend a seminar when we asked what the catch was for such a low cost. We had a 4hr mind dumbing sell and only after 3.5 hrs. were we even told what it was they were selling.

All the time before that was to groom us into a false sense of security and also to find out more about us and the type of holidays we take.

So, in a nutshell, they are selling a scheme whereby you pay up front and you get cheap holiday accommodation in various hotels around the world. Initially, we were being charged £25,000 for 6,000 points (funnily the woman was blatantly trying to hide when reading the cost from her folder by peeking at it and closing it as she worked out what price to pitch to us at), which is what you use to buy your holiday accommodation.

The more expensive the room the more points it costs. This was then dropped to £20,000 and when we said we were not interested they offered £4,000 for a lower number of points as a taster for us.

Again, we said we were not interested, and they got the picture. The fact that they had no fixed prices to show tells the story. They refused to give us any information to take away with us claiming that there were too many variations on what they offered.

The long and short of it is that it’s a hard sell and a con if they can’t give you anything on paper as to what it is they are selling and what it is you are buying. I thought that this kind of thing was illegal and to top it off it is happening at a Radisson hotel with their knowledge and consent to con their own customers, so I won’t be staying in one of these again.

This is a shame as the people and the food we did have there was actually quite good. But any hotel that exposes their customers to a con is not worthy of my business.

We were allocated a particular room in our booking confirmation but were given a different room in a different tower instead for some reason, and it certainly wasn’t an upgrade.

The room was not ready when we checked in (which was fine) although we were told it had been cleaned but needed to be quality checked before it could be released to us. Our baggage was put aside and we were told it would be taken up to our room prior to us getting the key. We received a text around an hour later and we collected our key cards from reception and went up to our newly allocated room. As it turned out the luggage had not been taken up to the room and we had to call down to get it sent up which took another half hour.

Now I’m not sure who “quality checked” the cleanliness of the room but it was filthy! The kitchen worktops were sticky, all the cups, plates, cooking and eating implements were grubby, the floor was tacky, the fridge was disgusting and there was black hair in the ice cube tray in the freezer… Also in the kitchen, the dishwasher does not fit under the worktop properly so it has been cut each side to kind of make it fit but it’s higher up there than the rest of the worktop and badly filled with some sort of silicone/filler. Very shoddy indeed.

The balcony “dividers are all rusty and our balcony table was covered in some sticky brown goo on the underside where the top had come off and had been badly repaired (although it was no longer actually attached to the peeling metal base).

The tap on the right-hand basin in the bathroom did not close off properly and it was accidentally left running on several occasions. One of the shower robes we were left with had a large tear/hole in the shoulder and do we no longer get the slippers?

We also had several issues with the DVD player. At first, we needed to have the TV volume up full to be able to just about hear the audio but this created a very loud hum making it impossible to hear anything. On inspection at the back of the DVD player I found that the Scart connector had basically fallen apart and all the internal cables were handing out.

An engineer replaced this cable for us but it made only a slight improvement. The next day the DVD player was replaced by something more up to date that had an HDMI connection instead of the antique Scart socket but clearly was not tested as the picture pixelated and froze every few seconds (we checked that it wasn’t the disc by trying several others). This was again replaced and finally, after 3 days we had a DVD player we could use.

Overall our experience was not good.

The tall lamps have been removed (from this room at least) making it quite dark without having the big main lights on, the furniture and woodwork are all very dated and are getting very tatty looking… five star this is not.

I realise it sounds like I’m just finding stuff to complain about but that really is not the case. We were pleased to see that you have started a happy hour each evening which we went 2 twice during our trip. Consistency in what was included between our two visits, however, did not seem to exist.

We were told on our first visit that local beers, wines, cocktails and long drinks were included, which was good as we like Cisk, Maltese wine and Gin. On our second visit however after ordering 2 tall gins, we were told that they were not included?

Finally, both my wife and I had a very unpleasant night following a meal while we were in the Swizzles bar. We had planned to watch the evenings entertainment in there so decided to order from the bar menu.

We both had the fish and chips and unfortunately had to leave before the entertainment started as we were feeling slightly unwell. This evolved into very unwell throughout the night with quite severe and ongoing diarrhoea. As this was the only meal where we both had the same thing we could only assume that it was the fish that had “disagreed” with us. In retrospect, we commented that the battered fish was an odd oily brown colour rather than a crispy golden colour and concluded that there was either something wrong with the fish itself or, more likely, that the oil the fish was deep fried in was old oil.

Our trip was certainly memorable, but for all the wrong reasons…