Cellino San Marco Holidays from £415

Wonderful, relaxing stay. Great for families.

Friendly welcome arrival, local information proactively shared about restaurants and local events. We opted for breakfast which was great very relaxing. Highly recommend this property to be close to Santa Maria de Leuca.

The noisiest hotel I have ever stayed at. Whilst the design has a nice aesthetic - the pool in a courtyard with rooms on all four sides - it’s an echo chamber which means you hear everything whilst in your room. It’s a new build with a fatal flaw. I was driven crazy by guests moving balcony furniture. It sounded as though they were right above my room. In fact they were three rooms away. The noise travels through the structure. I could hear people in the rooms next door coughing on one side and talking to their baby on the other. And then there’s the constant noise of the wheeling of trollies outside the room by hotel staff. There’s no world in which this is a five star hotel. It’s a nice, albeit noisy, four-star. Too many issues to list, from the ant infestation in the room when I checked in late at night, to their being no soap in the soap dispenser in the bathroom for the first two days, to the hotel refusing point blank to provide an iron. You have to put anything you want to quickly touch up with an iron through their laundry service. And many more minor things that don’t signal five stars. On the positive side, the bedroom air conditioning was excellent and the hotel has a beautiful pool. The food isn’t great, but it was edible. The staff clearly work hard and want to help, but it’s all a bit shambolic.

Our stay at Sangiorgio Resort & Spa was a little disappointing and not quite what we expected from a five-star hotel. We stayed for two nights (Wednesday and Thursday), and on both evenings there were parties with DJs and loud music until around 1am. One night, there was even a fireworks display after midnight right next to our window. This made it difficult to relax and sleep, which was particularly disappointing for a five-star resort. The rooms are spacious but feel quite dated, and the air conditioning in our room wasn’t working properly. The outdoor areas are beautiful, but overall we didn’t really feel the atmosphere or level of luxury we expected. On the positive side, the staff were lovely, the pool area is good, the gym is decent (although there is no air conditioning), and the restaurant was excellent. Overall, some good points, but the rooms, air conditioning and late-night events meant the experience fell short of five-star standards.