A LEVEL MELIA-ish EXPERIENCE IN ALBANIA
Finally I am back home and maybe it is time for some conclusion.
Not to many, because I am sure that all the episodes in this series gave you the right feeling about my week at Melia Durres in Albania.
Do you remember in the first episode how excited I was about my week in Melia Durres and my first visit to Albania. Watching that reaction, I still have a bitter taste.
First of all because Albania is far from what you can see in the travel adverts. The country has still a long way to be in line with the expectations of a modern tourism.
A country where is almost impossible to use your credit cards, a destination where is a massive difference between prices for locals and prices for tourism, even if you want to catch a taxi, a place where the basic rule of hospitality: being friendly and smile is difficult to follow, it is not, in my opinion, ready for international tourism at international standards.
Albania, in so many aspects remind me of Cuba, which taking in the account the recent communist history is not hard to understand. But for sure I will plan my next holiday in Albania maybe after I will wait another 2-3 years hoping that something will change.
The second massive disappointment was Melia Durres. I was hoping to find the same standards, high-class accommodation and services, a very strong LEVEL product like every other Melia hotel or resort I visited. And maybe more taking, in the account that Melia Durres is the newest Melia hotel, opened only in May and as every “new born” hospitality establishment their main target will be to ensure as quick as possible a return business.
But I was so wrong. The design, architecture and lay-out of Melia Durres is amazing, maybe one of the best resorts I ever visited. But the wow factor ends there.
The news that Melia will open a brand-new hotel in Durres, Albania attracted my attention at the beginning of 2023. I experienced THE LEVEL concept at both Melia resorts and hotels around the world and knowing the very high standards, the strong exclusive product, the unique combination of exclusive services and facilities designed for the most discerning travellers built a real excitement for my first holiday in Albania.
Add to all of this the obvious assumption that a brand-new hotel, only couple of weeks after the grand opening will go extra miles from all point of view to impress the first guests and create a solid return business. At least this is the general approach across the hospitality industry around the world.
Packed with all these expectations and excitement is easy to understand how big the disappointment was, when I discover the reality at Melia Durres so far not only from the Melia resorts standards but even from the promoted image of the hotel on-line and in social media.
But I was so wrong. The design, architecture and lay-out of Melia Durres is amazing, maybe one of the best resorts I ever visited. But the wow factor ends there.
The rest is a 150% failure from top to bottom: random and inconsistent service in bars and restaurant, poor quality of the food for any meals of the day, low standards of maintenance and housekeeping, dangerous and scary disregarding of international standards of food health and safety, and an incredible “can’t be bother” attitude style of the management team.
I still can’t believe that after having some goods stolen from my room, The Guests Experience Manager, refused to call the police and started his “own” investigation. And despite the fact that he has all evidence needed, included information from an application showing the precise location of what was stolen the results of his investigation was only a BS (beautiful speech) and not results. Indeed after my arrival back home I was contacted by the Guest Experience team and offered a full refund of the solen item. Thank you!
I still can’t believe that the General manager of Melia Durres, after chasing me around the hotel and finally cornered me by the pool, instead of acknowledge my feed-back, apologise or taking on board the information was just demanding to remove all videos from social media and post only “nice things”.
Melia Durres supposed to be an important step for the Spanish company who wants to ensure its presence in the most important destinations in Albania and opens the door to a new expansion, which would make the country one of Meliá’s strongholds in the Balkans and would consolidate its leadership in the Mediterranean.
To be honest, as a first impression, Meliá Durrës is a stunning hotel, with an architecture able to perfectly combine functionality and design. The architectural design has been carried out by the architect Alvaro Sans, with a perfect balance between outdoor and indoor spaces with an elegant interior design created by Room 1804 and ASAH. The spacious facilities of the Meliá Durrës are in perfect for enjoying the destination with an expected best hotel experience. With direct access to the beach right in front of the property, the hotel offers outdoor garden areas with spaces to relax under the sun, along with its swimming pool – the heart of the Meliá Dürres. In addition to the various outdoor pools, the hotel also has an indoor pool and two infinity pools located on rooftops, perfect for enjoying the spectacular sunsets overlooking the sea.
But be aware that despite the name – Melia Durres – the hotel is 37.2km from Durres, which involves a good 45 minutes’ drive. Add to this that the “helpful” front Desk who will offer you a taxi (a company which I expect has a contract with the hotel) for a “bargain” price of 40 Euros (one way). Luckily after searching the internet, I found a different company DO TAXI ( https://do-taxi-toptani.business.site ) reliable, safe and with an affordable half tariff than the one offered by the hotel. So keep in mind that if you don’t want to spend too much on taxis you are basically isolated in the middle of nowhere on the coast of Adriatic sea.
At the moment of booking (I booked the holiday with British Airways Holidays – https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/flights-and-holidays/holidays ) the only available room in THE LEVEL at Melia Durres was “The Level Sea View”. Not really a “sea view” more “pool view with a peek a boo of the sea”. But the room was designed in line with all Melia standards: 36m², DreamMaker mattress, “The Ritual of Jing” bathroom amenities by Rituals®, a beautiful bathtub and separate shower and WC, in-room coffee and tea service and a nice spacious terrace looking over the swimming pool.
Unfortunately, the wow factor of the room started and ended with the design due to a lot of short-cuts decided by the hotel’s management. Far from being at the usual LEVEL standards everything associated with the room was not worth to pay for: the linen was a random mix between LEVEL and “normal” items, the bathroom amenities placed in an elegant holder fall at the opening of the hotel I think and were left laying on the shower floor, the one-touch phone never worked (great in case of an emergency), the AC packed in the middle of the night 4 out of 7 days and with no maintenance night-shift left the room at a “comfortable” temperature of 26.7C every night, the “do not disturb sign” on the door always ignored and give you the pleasure of unexpected visitors from different departments at the wrong moment, etc. Add to this the poor standards of housekeeping with a random “daily routine” created for a round room and ignoring the corners, shower, mirror and anything else that was too complicated. But at least the room was cleaner than the public toilets in the hotel!
According to their website Melia Durres offers Great dining options based around Mediterranean cuisine. My package was the all-inclusive one and I must say that was the first time in an all-inclusive holiday when I lost weight.
The market cuisine concept MERKADO was basically the buffet were everybody, depends on their package will get their breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Melia Durres promises a surprising international cuisine with Mediterranean influences in a buffet with show cooking and areas offering the best cakes, salads, fish dishes, meat, and fresh vegetables for every meal of the day.
The reality was part of the wonderful world of indigestion for every meal of the day: cheap ingredients, bad cooking, lack of healthy options, overcooked dishes, an obsession with low quality meat (mainly pork and fish cooked in cheap cooking oil or dubious sauces, an always messy presentation of the buffet (with leftovers, empty trays, food spilled and never cleaned on service surfaces).
But what was really dangerous and scarry in MERKADO was how the management was ignoring the basic rules of health and safety related to preparing and service food in public spaces. According to any regulations to avoid cross-contamination you should consider the cleanliness of staff, surfaces and utensils, storage of food, disposal of waste, raw foods should be kept separate from ready to eat foods. If they must be stored together then make sure that raw meat/fish/eggs or poultry is stored below the ready to eat foods. At Melia Durres the management never heard about these rules and MERKADO one day will be the source of major health issue in the resorts. Until then the culinary experience in Merkado was not a pleasant one.
Elyxir is a beautiful design space, reminding me of an elegant continental café, quit and, what a relief, excellent AC. Coffee, freshly squeezed fruit juices (from a box) and healthy snacks (aka dry cakes) are served from early in the day until late in the evening. I stopped there just to take some photos and film couple of minutes as the place not being part of the all-inclusive as always almost dead.
Casa Nostra is the Italian restaurant at Melia Durres, offering traditional Italian cuisine prepared with better quality ingredients than in the buffet. Indeed, my dinner there was very pleasant with balanced dishes and a great service in an authentic-ish atmosphere. A little bit weird how when ordering a wine from the Wine List which was missing, it was replaced with another one (Albanian and actually very good) with no price and no mention in the menu. It was charged as a “Sommelier’s choice” – Melia Durres auditor must be a magician to sort out the financial and stock mess.
Cape Nao intend to bring Mediterranean cuisine at Melia Durres with an exquisite menu including superior quality cuts of meat, fresh fish, shellfish and salads. The restaurant is quite weird being located in a corridor from which you access the swimming pool from the hotel and therefor for an elegant lunch and dinner you have included a impromptu swimwear fashion show or couple of children races. The menu is not very big, which is normally a good sign, but unfortunately the waste is huge as the waiters never remember the orders and bring random dishes or wrong dishes at your table. The service is chaotic too with too many episodes of “lost in translation” or “lost in space” moments. Whatever I order that night had a very “MERKADO style” overcooked, with a taste of cheap over-used oil and a “on the spot” interpretation of what was describe in the menu. And, once, again, the wine story from Casa Nostra was repeated, this time being charged for the wine I ordered not the one served.
But to be honest the chance to experience those two alternative dining options are quite small as you need to book a table and the entire process is a pain in the … back: first you need to wait in line in front of a desk in the lobby where a girl with a lot of folders and a “computer says NO” attitude will tell you that everything is fully booked. And when finally, you find a table, on a Thursday, for lunch she will request a voucher. After 7 days at Melia Durres I never solve the mystery of this voucher: from where, from whom and why. Fortunately, I had the right connection, and I secured a table on 2 nights, despite the fact that the restaurants were never full. Maybe, as they are listed on the all-inclusive package, the management is trying, AGAIN, to cut corners and save money.
The bars at Melia Durres could be one of the highlights of my stay: The Sports Bar – a very dynamic place with drinks and comfort food; The Plaza Bar where signature cocktails and classic favourites were offered on the menu; The Pool Bar with it’s funny feature of a half-submerse bar, the perfect choice, in theory, to cool off both inside and out; Grap and Go – halfway towards the beach, aiming to offer American cuisine in a beach atmosphere with sea views, kind of a quick and easy option to savour a healthy proposal which surprise, surprise was never open. But once again the reality won over the website: the service in all bars was very slowly with waiters with no directions or leadership, taking the same orders twice and forgetting the same order three time. Everybody looked overworked and forced to be there which didn’t help to create a relaxing or fun ambiance. The weirdest think was the way how they made the drinks in all bars: doesn’t matter the place or the time of the day the SAME drink come in different glass, different size and different taste – sometimes very strong sometimes very weak, but NEVER the same! I was watching some of the bartenders making cocktails, never using a measure and wasting some much alcohol that I couldn’t stop thinking if anybody in the management team really know the alcohol consumption or the real cost of a … Mojito for example in this hotel. Talking about the costs, the inconsistency was present even after you order the drink: sometimes you are asked to sign a bill, sometimes you were asked the room number and sometimes the waiter just walk away. Maybe they were trying to cover the costs of the drinks in the bars with cheap food in the buffet…who knows the complicated hospitality thinking process of the managers at Melia Durres. Of course, as always, some exception made my evening in Melia Durres bars more acceptable when Daniel at the Rooftop Bar or Klaudio at the Sports Bar were in charge of my drinks.
The hotel offers a Premium Spa Welnnes Center with a small but well-equipped gym (no clean towels available or any tools of cleaning/disinfecting the equipment, but that’s a housekeeping story) and a Premium Spa. You can call it “premium” twice, because the prices for different treatment are with 50-75% more expensive than in a 5-star hotels in the centre of any European capitals. But if you want to pay between 150-175 Euros for a 50-minute massage session, no worries the booking will not be a problem.
The beach of Melia Durres is huge, not very far from the main pool and has a lot of sunbeds and umbrellas free of charge for the guests of the hotel. When I was at the hotel the entire beach was not ready yet but I am sure when everything will be done – probably at the end of the season the beach will be gorgeous with all the facility needed. My only worries were that Melia Durres hotel beach is located between 2 public beaches incredible dirty and polluted, with huge E. coli infection sources a little bit to close (dirty nappies, ad-hoc public toilets, piles of plastic rubbish and food waste) with no separation from the hotel beach or sea.
Melia Durres has a kind of Activity/Entertainment manager who’s trying hard to provide a certain type of entertainment during the day and evenings: yoga classes, aqua gym during the day and various entertainment acts during the evening. I have to admit that the musicians performing every evening in the garden were very good, I saw a folkloric show not at all bad and some interactive dancing evenings above mediocre. So, thumbs up for the activity team – not necessary Melia quality but better than the rest of the hotel.
All the time when I choose Melia chain for holiday or business, I always book a LEVEL room knowing how strong and consistent the product is all around the world. At Melia Durres “THE LEVEL” is only a word sculpted in wood on a wall, bringing together a strong hard product (rooms, infinity pool, lounge) with a very week, almost inexistent soft product (services, customer experience, facilities).
Checking the Melia Durres website, on the LEVEL page let me explain you step by step why at the hotel THE LEVEL concept got lost in translation:
- “Private check-in and check-out” – maybe if you arrive on a Tuesday, at 10.30AM, every other week the private and personalised experience will happen. The Level reception is hidden in an office with frosted windows and a sign PRIVATE behind the reception. I check-in and check-out at the Front Desk trying to understand the very off attitude of the staff asking me if I want to check in (no I am here at 9.00PM just for fun with my 4 suitcases and a tired face after a 10 hours journey) or if I really want a printed copy of my bill (No charge me whatever you want I trust your establishment sooooooooooo much!). The Concierge function was reduced to a printed paper with some QR codes for overpriced taxi services or guided tours. Maybe at Melia Durres is not usual for a Concierge to provide options and let the guests to be the one choosing what fits his/her needs.
- “Private pool” located next to the LEVEL Lounge was indeed a very nice place when was not full of family of children confusing the place with the nearby children pool. Here the lack of maintenance was pretty visible as the walls of the pool started to be a protective area for the local algae.
- “Access to the private Lounge” – the beautifully designed Lounge was indeed the best part of THE LEVEL at Melia Durres…not perfect but closer to what LEVEL suppose to be. The breakfast was decent, with a kind of an attentive service (more focused on cleaning the tables than bringing orders) and a nice buffet which still needed a bit of attention to restocking and cleanliness. But was a breath of fresh air comparing to the gastronomic hell in Merkado offered as a start of your day at Melia Durres. The other Lounge experience was the “happy hours” offered in early evenings for the guests in LEVEL: a weird selections of drinks(whiskey, Fernet Branca, Rakia, cheap white, red wines and cava) with no mixers and no ice, some melted or dry left-overs from breakfast as snacks and plenty of dry snacks surviving day after day in the heat in very sad jars. Not exactly the place where I wanted to start my evenings.
- “Rooftop pool and bar” – another fabulous addition to the LEVEL at Melia Durres at least from the location and architecture point of view. Located on the roof of the towers at the end of the 2 wings of the hotel, the two rooftops include enough sunbeds, a comfortable charming sitting area, a gorgeous infinity pool and a well-stocked bar. The access, available only for the guests in LEVEL was planned to be gained by using your room card in the elevator. But the system didn’t work and therefore, sometimes, during the morning a LEVEL hostess with a printout of the guests list will check if you belong or not there. But after the end of the shift anyone could access the space and the “adult only and LEVEL” only area was transformed after 2.00PM in an extension of the main pool. The bar had a random schedule, with opening time “sometimes in the morning” and closing around 4.30PM when the poor bartender moved to the other rooftop bar, in the other corner of the hotel. So, in case you don’t want to relocate from one rooftop to the other and follow your favourite barman forget about “admiring the breath-taking sunset with a delicious cocktail” (quote from Melia Durres website). And something else: the LEVEL rooftop bar can easily win the award for the “dirtiest toilet on the premises” as after lunch, every day the facility reminded me of a busy train station’s toilet during rush hours: never cleaned, no toilet papers or paper towels, no hand dryer, just a smell revealing the functionality of the place.
Bottom line THE LEVEL at Melia Durres is far from being a real LEVEL … it is not close enough to be LEVEL-ish. The lack of standards, care for customer experience, consistency give the feeling that the Melia’s “LEVEL know-how” is constantly ignored, adapted and re-interpretated. Based on my recent experience if Melia Durres will be the first Melia hotel and THE LEVEL at Melia Durres will be the first Level experience for sure I will never choose the brand or the product again. It’s pointless to pay 3 or 4 times more if in exchange you will get only the peacock’s attitude of a managerial team busy to create fake reviews with plenty of adjectives which will make even the best AI writer jalouse, than a real professional land efficient leadership.
Fortunately, I travelled enough to realise that one bad experience can’t cancel the other 1001 excellent ones.
To assess the quality of any type of services, especially in the hospitality industry a questionnaire at the end of the stay will ask to very important questions:
- How likely are you to recommend us to friends or family on a scale from 0 to 10?
- How likely are you to book again with us on a scale from 0 to 10?
Looking back at my Melia Durres experience I will need a new mark on the scale: “-5”.
I know that the hotel was just opened, that things are not perfect at any beginning, that people can learn and be trained, and process are perfectible, but at Melia Durres the problem lies with a very arrogant, self-sufficient, inefficient management incapable to grow and to deal with issues, ignoring the fact that feed-back from your clients is a gift, that repetitive business is the cheapest way to make profit.
From General Manager and Guest Experience Manager to bar and restaurants managers, at Melia Durres they live in a bubble where only the positive comments are accepting, where blaming the others is an office policy, where apologising is for lower grades and customer service recovery was not invented. The rest of the staff are working very hard, trying to do their best but without a clear leadership the failure is like a daily routine. The famous “walking the talk” dimension of modern leadership has at Melia Durres a completely opposite effect that the normal one.
I do hope that during the winter, when the hotel will be closed, Melia Durres will have a lot of maintenance done not only on the hard product but on the human factor too, especially at the top and mid management level.
And maybe in the future, if the hotel will still be part of the Melia group and still have the LEVEL product (happened before with Melia distancing itself from hotels which couldn’t keep the standards) I will try again, ready to admit all the positive changes and efforts and happy for a “Melia Durres revisited” page.
Leonard Miron 