Gran Meliá Don Pepe

My second stay at the Don Pepe and just as great as the first. The hotel itself has wow factor with beautiful and plentiful facilities. The staff all go the extra mile and the birthday cake and bottle of cava in the room for my wife???s birthday was totally unprompted and very much appreciated. Breakfast restaurant is lovely and relaxing to start your day and the service chirpy and friendly. Perfectly located on the sea front and you can easily walk to the old town and even Banus if you are feeling energetic. Excellent and will definitely be back.

The hotel is located bit far from the old city centre (i.e. Plaza de los Naranjos) where good authentic Spanish restaurants are there, nevertheless, there are many restaurants nearby the hotel but most of them are tourist-oriented restaurants. Hotel restaurants have good seating and nice dishes with hefty prices compared to other restaurants in the area. Hotel has beautiful garden/pool and enough lounge-chairs for sun-bath, we loved it. In addition, there is indoor swimming pool and gym good for keeping oneself fit. We stayed in supreme red level room on the sixths floor, beautiful views of the sea and pool, and receiving plenty of sunshine the whole day, amazing location for people starving for sun-shine escaping the cold and dark December. Room was small size for two but we managed, however, the bathroom somehow tiny and a person above the average size would have a problem to manoeuvre inside or to hang clothes or towel. Also, the ground is slippery and therefore we requested rubber-mat for the shower purpose. Service and cleaning staff are nice and responsive but they are unfortunately not proactive in their work and you have to call room service to provide what???s missing. Red level lounge is spacious with relaxing sunny terraces and accommodate all the guests. The snacks are not something special to coincides with 5-stars hotel classification; mainly cold small wraps and no hot snacks at all, moreover, during our stay of 12 days, the snacks underwent minimal slight modifications over time. It is supposed to be 5-star red-level and therefore we expected better happy hour snacks display. Drinks varities were good (no champagne!). Breakfasts downstairs and in the red level lounge were good with average hot food offers. Dishes such as noddle and some other Asian dishes were missing, however, we appreciated the healthy fresh juices especially the nutritious greenish juice. Service at the breakfast venue (both ground floor and lounge) was perfect, staff were all friendly and responsive and some of them were proactive as such, gave good attention to the guest's food and drink preferences, Sylvia and Javier are just an example, unfortunately I don???t remember all names, big thanks to all of them. We had the Christmas dinner at the Erre Restaurant, food was delicious and well prepared both in quality and ingredients and staff were all attentive and friendly, many thanks to all of them. New year dinner was at Tahini restaurant, fantastic Japanese dishes and nice friendly attentative staff, thanks to all of them and in particular to the Chef and his assistants for the great dinner we had there, we will visit you for sure whenever we come to Marbella. Marbella city is nice, warm, sunny days, nice people, and Melia Don Pepe is fantastic choice if one can get special discount. We booked well in advance and got special voucher discount. We consider room rates attractive only if one can get good discounted offers, otherwise, room prices are really high compared to other hotels of the same level. We left the place with beautiful memories of a nice sunny city and people were all friendly and helpful in everything, all of these aspects will attract us to be there once again in future. Thanks to all of the managment staff of Melia Don Pepe for everything and especially the new-year and X'mas events were just fantastic.