Villa Bebek Hotel

We stayed at Villa Bebek for a few nights this April and to start with something positive: the hotel area is quite beautiful and well maintained, especially the pool area is nice. The beach is reasonably close and the hotel offers a Tuktuk service to get you there (even though we never got to use it). Rooms were ok and clean, quite dark and not as fancy as you would expect for a hotel with their price level (expensive!). Now comes the tricky part. While we don't expect to be greated by staff in fluent English, not a single person! at the hotel during our stay was able to speak even a few words of English (and we are talking very very basic), nor Spanish, French or any other language other than Portuguese. You would expect of a four star hotel that advertises its amenities on international booking sites, that at least one staff member would be able to assist us during check in and check out, explain the hotel services, amenities and rules to us, and ensure we were okay and taken care of. Instead, we received a SMS with some basic info prior to our stay. That's it. Generally, staff was quite reserved and did not seem motivated at all to meet us half way, for example through the use of an online translator etc., or to write things down for us. Instead, we were spoken to stubbornly in Portuguese, even though we were clearly lost. While it may seem like no big deal, in the end we ended up paying for services that were never offered to us, like food options during breakfast that were not part of the buffet but had to be ordered through staff (we were never asked), or the TukTuk service, which requires you exchange messages with the driver via internet while on the beach - in Portuguese. Oh well. Perhaps it was due to the communication problems, but overall we did not feel valued as guests. The food was underwhelming too. Breakfast was okay, dinner was average quality and heavily overpriced for what it was worth. It is a nice area, and for that we had a good time, but the service is disappointing.