This hotel was the base for our 7 night tour. It is situated at the far end of the resort of Rabac and has a supermarket, pizzeria and bar on the complex but it only takes 10 mins to walk into the heart of the resort if you want more choice. Rabac is quite a small place – you can walk from one end to the other in under an hour – but it had everything we needed (including cashpoints and a pharmacy) so we were quite happy staying there. Our favourite place to drink was the Vinoteca bar, which is signposted up some stairs, just before you reach the main harbour area. 30p for a small glass of wine - bargain!

It would be fair to say that the hotel is a bit of a blot on the landscape – a vast expanse of concrete painted in lurid pastels – but once you’re in your room then all you can see is the beautiful view of the sea, the surrounding hills and Cres Island in the distance. Based on negative reviews of the standard rooms overlooking a noisy road, we paid extra for a balcony room. This only cost an extra £35 and was well worth it for the views and outside space. There was certainly no road noise at the front of the hotel, but we were sometimes woken up by the dawn chorus or the sound of Croatian karaoke emanating from the Conca d’Oro. Nothing a good pair of earplugs couldn’t fix though!

The room itself was fine given its 3 star rating. We were on the top floor (floor 7) and had 3 single beds in our room – staged to look like a double and single – so we had loads of room for all our stuff. The bathroom was also fine – it could take a while to get the shower pressure and temperature right but there was certainly plenty of hot water. We weren’t planning to watch much TV but it was nice to have a couple of English channels along with some entertaining German versions of MTV.

A lot of previous guests have complained about the food but, for £5 each per night for dinner including wine and water, we were really happy with what we were given. I would consider myself to be a fussy eater but I didn’t have any problems finding stuff to eat. It would have been nice to have had a wider variety of desserts at dinner and the breakfast selection was very repetitive but we managed fine. The staff were always very pleasant, despite often being rushed off their feet, and they were very flexible with start and end times when our group arrived back late or had to leave early.

The staff on reception were also always helpful and it was useful that they would display printouts of the weather forecasts. We actually ended up spending a lot of our time out of the hotel but the pool seemed well used and it was handy having a supermarket on site. Overall, this is not the best hotel we have ever stayed at, but it’s also not the worst by a long way and we would be more than happy to stay there again.