Chayofa Country Club – Tenerife

Up a mountain, food not great.

Here we go. Chayofa Country Club.

We arrived in the small hours to be greeted by the nice Non English security man who directed us to the keys that had been left out for us. No worries checking in.

The rooms are clean so you won’t have any worries there.

The kitchen is well kitted out with all utensils, fridge and freezer, oven, grill, hob & microwave. We were a family of three. It had one bedroom and a sofa that could be used in the front room. The bedroom double bed was 2 beds pushed together but it was big enough for us all to sleep in apart from the beds moving apart.

The room had a tv with no English channels.

The pool looks great but due to their filtration system, it makes it ice cold. Not for me but may appeal to some who like cold thermogenesis type therapy.

I’m certain the pool is this cold all year round which is a shame because it looks great and the green astroturf around it. Feedback here would be to get a better-heated filtration system because its a real loss without it.

The pool bar had a happy hour from 11 to 5pm which meant you bought any drink and you got one free. However what was disappointing is sometimes you were asked by the bar staff if you want your second free drink, or you had to go out of the way and ask them when they put 1 drink in front of you. It just felt awkward having to ask for your 2nd drink sometimes.

At the restaurant they serve a dinner every night and do a 3 course special for only 10 euro. The starters are very small. For example, i ordered to cajun chicken bites and received 4 pieces of chicken the size of Maltesers. To be fairly blunt the Mon/Sat food wasn’t great here at all, all courses we had were below standard. They would be better charging a little extra to source better quality, fresh food because guests are only going to travel somewhere else anyway for better food and the expense from that travel could’ve been utilised on paying for better food at the onsite restaurant..

For example, we had a steak and it just had an unpleasant taste about it, (all meals did) not sure if it was frozen or something it just wasn’t nice. I would advise anyone going to have pepper sauce here to Avoid. The pepper sauce was like Mr Muscle kitchen cleaner. Almost like a lemon bleach flavour. Totally ruined the appeal of the restaurant to us. We said to the waitress about it and asked her to try it (which she didn’t) and she said it was the peppers. I’ve had a streak and pepper sauce in many different countries around the world. Pepper sauce has never tasted like that. It was almost like whoever cleaned the pans the sauce was cooked in, forgot to empty the cleaning residue. The guest behind us also complained about the pepper sauce. So feedback there would be don’t get the pepper sauce and to Chayofa; Probably a good idea to review the food your serving in a tasting session because most food we had was not great and were fairly complacent with food quality.

Another example was the double beef burger on the restaurant burger tasted exactly like a microwave burger. Some positive points ion the food menu is, In the bar, they do a chicken burger. It was great! Put it on your restaurant menu, you will get more smiley faces because it couldn’t be faulted. The Sunday carvery I’m told was nice. It looked nice but by that stage, we were put off with what we already had that we don’t try it. The country club has permanent residents and I didn’t see plenty of guests. I’m assuming the place has more permanent residents that it does guests because the number of guests there were quite small.

The restaurant put on entertainment every night which definitely shows they are trying, it was empty so it was more like last chance saloon but i have to give it to them for putting on entertainment for such small amount of guests every night.

Staff wise, I found Ceri, and barman Mark pleasant. I checked out with whom I believe was the owner on the last day and he seemed very nice, I think he was away on holiday whilst our stay.

One thing I will point out here is, On our 3rd or 4th day, We had run out of towels, all dirty for a family of three. My wife went to the cleaners to ask for new towels, cleaner asked what room we were in and said 15min. Waited 15min in the room with no sign of towels, wife went back to him and he told her no and to go to the reception, I believe my wife spoke to Ceri who told her that they don’t give you any new towels but if we do want new towels, its 1 euro per towel. Have to say that’s pretty lame and never happened before so it is probably good to point this out to anyone that thinks they can live on a few towels for a week. The other option given was dry clean them ourselves which we presume we had to pay for. It goes without saying, we’re trying to be on a holiday break! Not cleaning towels! So this was a bit low with my wife walking away from reception unhappy. 30minutes later someone knocks the door with towels and says sorry. Not sure what the set up was here. Probably needs to be fixed within management. The other staff 2 girls working here I wouldn’t say we had a bad experience with them but do you know when you feel as if someone has a thinly veiled patronising thing about them as if you’re an idiot? That was kinda the feeling we got from them. For example, our first day I grabbed a couple of menus to take down to our table and was told no by the blond haired girl, she would bring them down. Why not just let us take them down to the table? weird things like this with them all week. The younger girl one night was walking past and we asked for a beer and she was like hold on. Why not just say yes and do it when you can? Another night we went to the restaurant to get a table for 2 and were asked did we have a reservation. The place was empty! They were silly things but after a few encounters, it starts to build a bad taste.

Facilities wise, There are several tennis courts that seem to be very popular with the elderly with a bar on site. At the corner of the Chayofa, they have a supermarket with pretty much everything you need. Although I would point out that a lot of the prices are around 30% more expensive in this supermarket than the other popular supermarket chains.

Apart from what I’ve mentioned here, there isn’t much more to do at the country club that we have seen.

It is in a village so you have a couple of restaurants about 5 minutes away but they are not very public, i.e at night if you walked to them from the country club you would likely to be walking alone etc. So for us, we do like to get out so there’s a bus stop outside Chayofa that takes you to Los Cristianos.

For 3 passengers it worked out around 4.35 euro single in total for all 3. The buses come not that regular and they seem to be always 20min late from the timetable. The country club is up a mountain so you are travelling up and down a mountain every day if you want to get out. If you get the bus there’s some hairy corners with cliffs you take, especially at the hospital. Taxis are slightly easier which varied in price, They are around 8 euro single but some taxis did take us on a detour, one even charged us 15 euro which is almost double what the other taxis charged.

Overall, You could self sustain yourself at the country club. If you can eat fairly low standard food they serve. Apart from the entertainment, there is nothing really to do in the area day and night. We like to try and get out to shops etc so there is some travel involved. (About 80 euro on travel spent for a week)

Personally, if we go back we would stay closer to the beach so that we didn’t have the additional travel expenses and more food choices. We stayed in December and it was boiling compared to the UK. Tenerife is a great place, not too expensive.

Some parts feel a little bit dodgy in Los Cristianos so keep your belongings about you as we heard a woman beside us say she had her bag stolen in one of the side streets. Some man also came up to my wife and started distracting her about showing her his wife on his phone while another man stood close to my wife back. Not sure what that was about but the shopkeeper came over and asked my wife were we all together and the men left.

Food in Tenerife can be hit or miss.

There is a cafe across the road from the bus station at Los Christianos called la media luna, we went there for a breakfast and it wasn’t great.

However, all restaurants around the hard rock cafe are excellent.

As one man told us it would be hard to get something down here that wasn’t great because they are all competing for business so their food has to be top notch which it all was.

So if you’re looking for something nice to eat, any place around the hard rock cafe is where to go. There are lots of shops around here as well.

We booked through booking.com. When I searched for places to stay on booking.com I searched for Las Americas and Chayofa was one of the first to come up. booking.com made it as if it was in LasAmericass and that it was a top place to stay, i wouldn’t agree with this in terms of location, things to do and food quality.