Villas de Santa Fe
Mixed feelings about Villas de Santa Fe
We recently spent a week at Villas de Santa Fe and, for the most part, genuinely enjoyed our experience. We had a one-bedroom unit that was clean and generally well maintained, although the carpet was showing clear signs of wear and tear and the concrete on the balcony was crumbling in places. We were in Building 2, which has a rabbit warren of halls and corridors that made it difficult to find your room. It didn’t help that all the halls were being repainted while we were there. We were there for a week and had to ask ourselves “Now, which direction do we turn here?” every time we walked in.
With regard to our unit, it theoretically could sleep four, with two people on the sofa bed in the living room, but I can’t imagine living like that for a week. With the sofa open, there would barely be room to manoeuvre in the living room. Plus, the bathroom is actually off the bedroom, so there wouldn’t be any privacy. I’m also not sure how comfortable sleeping on that sofa bed would be; as a sofa, it was very uncomfortable to sit on and the cushions never stayed in place.
Another quibble is with the bathroom. I will never understand why hotel bathroom designers put the towel rack on the other side of the room so that you drip all over trying to get a towel. Towel racks should be near the shower.
On the plus side, the resort is a short walk to the Plaza, with any number of interesting museums to visit, shops to browse in, and great restaurants to eat it. It’s an even shorter walk to the DeVargas shopping centre, which has additional dining options plus Albertsons and CVS. The resort has a shuttle that takes you to the Plaza, but we never used it because it was just as easy to walk. And, as it turns out because we were in town during the Fiestas de Santa Fe, the shuttle didn’t run at times due to street closures.
My lukewarm rating here is due to a few factors that marred our visit. The first is that when we arrived the parking lots for the building were blocked off with guards and netting across some entrances. This was because Zozobra was taking place not too far away, so the management wanted to keep festival goers from parking in their lots. The unintended consequence of this was that the guards did nothing to encourage actual guests from pulling in. We circled the block numerous times before parking down the street and walking to the administration building in the rain. I can understand wanting to keep the parking lot available for guests, but there has to be a way to do it that doesn’t make guests think that they can’t park at all.
The second issue is that the units are NOISY. I think that part of it is because the area near the small dining table is not carpeted. We really heard it every time the people in the unit above us pulled a chair out or pushed it back in. But, while I understand that there will be some noise in a multi-unit environment, this was excessive. We heard every door close in the unit above, multiple times.
Third, I needed to use the resort’s WiFi to do some work on my laptop. When I logged on to the allegedly secure network, my security software immediately began shooting out pop-ups telling me which malwares it was fighting off. Thank goodness I keep all my security settings up to date, because I’ve never seen the software behave like that. It was relentless. It lit up like a Christmas tree every time I wanted to use my laptop. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend using the WiFi to anyone who doesn’t have a better-than-average security profile on their device.