Aqua Mirage Club Marrakech

Just back from 10 nights here Reception staff just rude and unhelpful - we checked in and had booked a total of 9 rooms across multiple families only to be issued keys for 8 rooms it took upto 4 hours for them to listen to us but unable to provide the 9th room, this didnt get resolved until 12.30pm the next day! They had bundled the total number of guests together and spread them across 8 rooms rather than providing what we had booked. The reception staff where just rude unhelpful and didnt care we had two people over 65 with health conditons literally with no room. It transpired they just didnt have enough rooms until other people checked out the next day, but they using every other excuse in the book and blaming others for the issue.

On tuesday night into the early hours of wednesday morning the fire alarm went off in our block the block evacuated the building and stood outside waiting for it to go off and be given the all clear, there was a smell of smoke but we think this was from something off resort as I can remember smelling something walking back that night. The alarm went off and a security guard was walking through the families outside saying ok to go back in, no more than 1min after him saying this the alarm sounded again.... so there were again stood outside round two waiting for some sort of instruction..... time passed by and the alarm silenced again, told once more no fire all ok to go back in as we were re entering someone on the top floor shouted down to the security and out of no where more secuirty and and maintenance men ran through the crowds and up the stairs, there was a fire on the roof! Literally no further information no support or staff making themseleves known until about a hour later we got told no fire no fire go back in. Incidents happen I get this but no structure was visable in the event of real incident. Not one staff member was visable to support or advise everyone was confused and our children werr nervous and upset.

Rooms clean and cleaned daily as expected. House keeping team on the ground floor where lovely and friendly.

Food - not alot to write about here its an AI menu its expected to be repeatative and it was. But enough to choose from and change up each night. No issues here from us.

Entertainment good main pool is where the daytime activities take place and everyone had a good time

Night time entertainment again good MJ show was the best of all.

Water park is great we spent most of our time over the 10 days here plenty of space and sun beds

Wasps yes there a pain yes they swarm the sugarary drinks but be smart tidy up your your empties and they dont bother you.

We did quad biking which was a good morning out of the resort and we was looked after really well.

This morning checked out and again another issue with reception claiming we hadnt paid enough toursit tax once again didnt listen to us or accept the receipts shown ended up having to pay the difference to get out of there.

In summary get passed reception rudeness and you'll be alright 🤣

First, the positives - animation team were friendly and enthusiastic. Also the food choice in the main buffet restaurant was good - many items repeated daily but the number of foods available meant that you could go several days without repeating something you had tried previously.

There were however quite a few issues.

The first is with this being an all inclusive hotel, with guests having effectively already paid for meals, snacks and drinks before arrival, there was clearly a management decision to make the distribution of these as slow as possible, presumably to keep their costs down. For example, there are time windows where snacks are available from the pool bars and during those windows there was usually 1 person taking the orders and handing over the snacks. For the entire hotel - it's a big hotel and so queues built up quickly and it's a hot place to be.

Same with the drinks in the evening - alcoholic drinks and non alcoholic cocktails were served by just 2 bar staff. On one occasion I did see a third bar member join in, but this bar is where you must go to get the drinks if you are in the evening entertainment area and the guest capacity of this hotel is around 1500 people, yet the 8 metre long bar was only set up to use the last 2 or 3 metres and had 2 people serving. Queuing, therefore was the theme of the evenings. The 3 drink per person policy (down to 1 drink per person after 11pm) simply made the queues even longer and meant that each family member had the pleasure of queuing for their own drink, rather than 1 person collecting them and getting back to watching the entertainment. Some people I saw in the queue resorted to collecting their 3 drink quota and then immediately re-joined at the back of the queue to get the fourth if they had 4 members in their family. How relaxing - for something you have already paid for before arrival.

I really don't think this is down to lack of staff - there were simply loads in the dining area. If the snack bars and drinks bars were paid ones and not all inclusive I'm sure they would all be fully staffed and in full use all the time.

Next issue was unfortunately some of the staff. Surprisingly the photographer had quite an aggressive side to him. One evening we had sat down to watch the very popular Michael Jackson tribute act and found some seats near to the photographer's kiosk. It seemed my son had his seat too close to his kiosk, as just as he took his seat, the photographer took it upon himself to rather aggressively simply push his chair, with my son still in it, a good 2 metres from where it was (and where the rest of us were). My son is 19 and the photographer didn't appear to find this easy to do. You'd think he might have asked him to simply move his chair if this it what the issue was, but he chose to without warning just push him out of the way. When I looked at him and asked what the problem was, he just mimed something towards me - not really sure what he was trying to say. What a charmer that guy is.

Less aggressive, but worth a mention was one of the main dining room staff. As other reviewers have mentioned, the main restaurant gets extremely busy and finding somewhere to sit can be quite a challenge. One of the evenings, we as a family of 4 struggled to find anywhere to sit but there were some tables of 6 available so we attempted to sit down at one of those. Straight away a dining room staff member came over and told us we couldn't sit there as they were for families of 6 only. I explained that we hadn't been able to find anywhere and these were available. Uninterested, he simply pointed in the direction of another section where tables of 4 were. We duly did as instructed and after a few mins in the area he pointed at, we found a table of 4 - set with just 3 sets of cutlery and there didn't appear to be any spare. So we sat down and I went back to our "friendly" staff member to say that we had indeed found somewhere to sit, but that it needed another knife and fork and could he please help? He simply looked rather smug and said that "this" (pointing at the tables of 6 ) was his area and he wouldn't be helping out with any cutlery. I guess he must have missed customer service training day.

Next, although upon arrival at reception we found the staff welcoming and efficient at checking us in, other visits to reception were less so. To book the shuttle bus into Marrakech we were told we should go to reception. We did this and asked at the desk - they directed us to the cashier. At the cashier desk, we were told that we needed to go to the other desk at the opposite end of reception as they dealt with shuttle bookings. Off we trot to the other desk, 2 people sat at either end of it and as we approach her she says "pool towels?" to which I say that I would like to book the shuttle bus. "Not me, my colleague" is the reply, pointing at the other end of the desk. We go to this person and ask to book the 4 of us on the shuttle and she gives us the price and I hand over my debit card. "If you want to pay by card you need to go to the cashier, tell her the amount and bring back the card receipt to me". Back to the other end of reception I go to the cashier and tell her the amount and that I need her to take the payment. After she helpfully recalculates the amount for me and concludes that it is what I told her initially, I have my card receipt and I'm back on my way to the other end of reception where I hand over my card receipt and the shuttle ticket is pushed across the desk at me. A nice slick process, no doubt fine tuned during staff training.

Finally, on our last night there was a fire alarm around 12:30am in Building 3. It sounded for a couple of minutes and didn't stop so I had a look outside our door and there were other guests looking around as well wondering if it was a false alarm or if we should get out. Phoned the reception (manned 24 hours we were told) - no answer. So we and the other guests all congregate outside our block looking for any signs of smoke and await the staff to come and tell us what to do next etc. After around 10 minutes, no sign of any staff and the alarm still going off we're all feeling quite puzzled and not entirely impressed about the lack of staff - was this an actual fire or not? We did eventually see a single security guard come running past but he had no updates for us. From the roof of our block there appeared to be a dull orange glow but it was hard to make out if this was just a roof light or a flame. With the lack of any other direction one of the guests took things into their own hands and attempted to extinguish this orange glow coming from the roof with a fire hose - it didn't really reach the roof from the angle and distance he was at, but he tried nonetheless. Another 20 minutes passed, still no hotel representative, the security guard didn't reappear and families with young children were understandably wanting to know if it was safe to go back in or if they should continue to wait. Eventually the alarm stopped and after another 10 mins or so, slowly people returned to their rooms assuming that there was no fire. The following morning the alarm once again goes off in the same block, most people choosing to ignore it. No staff to explain one way or the other.

At checkout the next day, no one on reception had any apology or explanation for us as to these fire alarms.

On our visit to aqua mirage resort our opinions varied throughout the holiday, on our first day we checked in at 1:00pm and had to wait around for a couple hours till 3pm or pay a price to get to our room as soon as we came. After we got to the water park we went on some slides which were excellent after that we had some refreshments but we found out why people had lids. BEWARE OF THE WASPS.Next, we went to get lunch where you could get one of these items each order: A sandwich A salad A dessert And found out the best options were the beef sandwich, the pasta salad, and moose which had brownie at the bottom which was quite great.As we were hot, we tried getting ice cream which cost 30 mad or £1.90 but we were disappointed as we thought the least they could do was to give us the ice cream for free as it was all inclusive. Then for dinner you can choose from the main buffet which we found was the best option spanning from foods like fish and chips to Asian pasta, the Italian a la carte restaurant which we found was disappointing as A-the service was horrible and at the end of the meal they perked up and started to be nice to try and get a tip B- their food was bog-standard and one steak was as chewy as gum and the other melted in your mouth C-they didn't Evan give dessert and the Moroccan restaurant was quite good as u would expect. Overall a good experience with amazing slides, great accommodation good food and a great sleep and would come again.