Cinco Plazas have the ambition to become a five star apartment hotel, but they can’t despite all efforts they make, as the basic construction of the hotel is too bad and secondly the maintain looks proper, but isn’t if you look into the details. The flat was cleaned every day with water and that was good, but with the same water that was used in the other flats, with the result that the dirt was just moved from one flat to the other one. The flat smells of dust, which mainly comes from the floors including the smell of uric acid in the toilet.
I told the reception about it and some hours later on, one have cleaned the floors properly and the smell of dust was very, very low and acceptable. I still contract a cough when I entered the bathroom. Now I recognised a smell of Aspergila Nigra a quite dangerous and very toxic mould known to promote lung cancer and I washed it away with boiling hot water, but it will come back again, as it might hide due to a bad and not proper made construction in the bathroom. Now the flat was clean or wasn’t it? No, now I recognized a wee smell of a cat in the flat but it didn’t matter at all. The smell was so low that most people living in towns can’t smell it at all. The walls and ceilings are too thin to stop the weakest noise from above and between the apartments. The curtains were hang up badly due to the lack of proper maintains or no interest to make a good impression at all and the wind was blowing trough the doorway even though door was closed, which made the apartment quite cold during the night.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t recommend Cinco Plazas, as it has some advantages.
The overall standard is good. It is a very good place, if you come with children and it seems that here are a lot of things for them to do, but if you want to relax at a quiet place to spend your holidays, you should look for something else. The worst thing was that the establishment have put out loudspeakers everywhere playing US junk music, unbelievable when they have such a great treasure of Spanish music to choose from. It was so loud and the speakers were placed only five meters from the flat that I hardly could hear the news from home on my tiny (pocket small) shortwave radio. There could also be a heavy cacophony from the children play in the pool but I don’t mind, children are children,
At Cinco Plazas there is some sort of evening entertainment, but they have put all effort in quantity (the loud sound) than a quality performance.

Don’t expect a gastronomic travel, it might be like the junk food restaurants back home.
At a Lani restaurant they served a quite old swordfish, stay away from them if you don’t have a stainless steal stomach. I know how fresh fish taste as I daily can have it fresh from the sea. It looks like that Puerto del Carmen has a lot of restaurants to choose between, but no. Almost every restaurant has something very close to junk food or should we say some sort of fast food, a great category of food to start or maintain a metabolic syndrome.
The kitchen in the flat at Cinco Plazas was equipped well enough to make food “at home” and we found a SPAR shop on the other side of the block, far better than the NETTO close by Cinco Plazas.

Puerto del Carmen is the worst Tourist trap with the strongest business cartel I have seen so far among the restaurants and don’t expect to make any bargains here, they will fool you in the shops, if you don’t know better and I have found out that the overall prices were two to three times higher here than at home including WAT.

Staff at Cinco Plazas is very good to deal with, but if you are interested in medicine and if you are unlucky depending how you see it, there might be a possibility to study a PMS syndrome behaviour it in the reception area.

Could you recommend Cinco Plazas?
Yes we can, but we think that they should put more effort to maintain the details at the establishment; we could easily give them four points of five, if they do something about the wee details.

The apartment were well equipped and everything looks clean and tidy, but we think that it is impossible for the maidens to smell the dust in the apartments due to the heavy smelling liquid they have in the water they clean the apartment with. We use something similar at home.

We stayed at Cinco Plazas in late-Nov/early-Dec 2007 on a Thomson package holiday. The place is very well presented, the rooms are clean and a respectable size and have a large balcony. It is very conveniently located close to the centre of Playda del Carmen. The Netto supermarket is just next door for all your self-catering needs (if you don't know the name, Netto is similar to Lidl and Aldi in UK), and the Hotel supermarket is useful too (especially for warm bread if you like that for breakfast).

We agree with the contents of most of the previous reviews, but as we think it is important that the whole picture is given to travellers, you should know about a major down side to this hotel. Because of the complex layout there are several rooms that have no view whatsoever from their balcony. And I mean NO view, except that of a white-washed wall. For this family an important part of any holiday is to sit on the veranda/balcony, whether day or night and soak and up the views and atmosphere. However, we were unfortunately allocated one of the no-view rooms (Room 3228). I immediately returned to reception and complained firmly but the receptionist, while trying to be helpful, couldn't do anything until the next day. I called the Thomson in-resort helpline who in turn contacted the hotel, but they confirmed there was no chance of an immediate move. Eventually, later the next day, we were moved to Room 2213 in a different area of the complex which was perfectly acceptable. If we hadn't been given another room we'd have packed up and moved out - the government Tourist Information & Hotel Booking Office is just at the bottom of the hill from the hotel and round to the left on the sea front.

These no-view rooms are probably suitable for holidaymakers who stay all day by the poolside and all night in the clubs, or low-cost, allocation-on-arrival vacations, but are totally inapproprite for full-price family use. Personally I think the proprietors (nordotel Group, part of Thomson/TUI) should take an honest approach and avoid using use these rooms for guests except in exceptional circumstances, and then a discount should be offered.

I'd have given the hotel 5 stars for the room quality, facilites and amenities, but because of the (estimated) 10 or so no-view rooms I feel the complex overall is worth no more than 3 star, particularly if you are paying full price.

uncletony, Aberdeen, UK

Me and my friend stayed at the cinco plaza hotel it was our first holiday abroud baringin mind only 18 had the best time the hotel was amazing we dont know how the staff put up with us coming in at 6 in the morning jumping in the pools and singing out loud and causing havook.It was so good we did not want to come home now we have decided to come back and live here and find work if wasnt for a nice welcome to the hotel we would of wanted to come home on our first night. We booked our holiday a day before we set off got a last minute deal allocated on arrival and it was the best thing we ever done staying in the cinco plaza.

Natalie and Toni from Feltham middlesex England

My boyfriend and I stayed here for 10 days at the begining of September 2007. After a very early morning flight, we couldn't wait to get to the hotel and have a shower and sleep. When we arrived at reception we were told our room wouldn't be ready - wasn't a problem and we sat and waited for about 10 mins and then they told us our room was ready. We were handed our key and a map of the hotel complex, I didn't realise just how big the complex was. The receptionist didn't really give us much help by telling us where to go but after five minutes we finally fount our room. There are 3 swimming pools and each pool has all the apartments around them, the pools were really busy and people were up at the crack of dawn reserving sun loungers which is quite annoying. I was a little bit disappointed in the room as they were very basic, plus the beds had two single beds pushed together which looks quite cheap and you also had to pay to use the TV. The rooms are not equiped with hairdryers so either take your own or you can hire them from the reception desk and are very cheap. The rooms were cleaned every other day giving you clean towells albeit they smelt funky which is probably down to the soap powder. The swimming pool area was pretty dirty as some young girls were smoking around the pool and 4 days later they cigarette butts were still there, not a problem just make sure you always have your flip flops with you.

The hotel is in an excellent location even though its on quite a steep hill - not cool in heels!! There is a huge sumermarket right next door to the hotel and at the bottom of the hill there are loads of lovely resturants, my personal favourite was the Slow Boat 3rd chinese restaurant, which is up stairs to an arcade I think, we liked it so much we went back twice. Don't go to the American resturant as the food was terrible even though it was always so busy.

There is a complex that has 26 night clubs and bars that are open until the early hours of the morning. There is a shopping mall in Puerto Del Carmen but its quite far from the hotel but is walking distance - we walked there once and it took about 20 mins... You're not really missing very as it has more food places than clothes.

I hope you all have a wonderful stay here and would recommend to others.