Rutllan Hotel, La Massana, Andorra
Hotel Information
Recent Price: £140
The cable car is next door to the hotel. The Hotel is in La Massana, a quiet area just 3 miles from the commercial centre of Andorra and close to the Pal and Arinsal ski resorts.
Hotel Class:
Hotel Description:
This Hotel will appeal to families and couples looking for a quieter location with good accessibility to the ski runs and to the rest of Andorra. The hotel has excellent facilities opposite ski lifts and offers superb value.The cable car is next door to the hotel. The Hotel is in La Massana, a quiet area just 3 miles from the commercial centre of Andorra and close to the Pal and Arinsal ski resorts.
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Rutllan Hotel Reviews
The entrance to the ski lift is indeed almost directly opposite the hotel entrance. If you are there to ski, then the hotel provides a locker for your skis and boots in a room off the underground car park. So, when fully booted and ready to go to the pistes, there is another fifty yards or so to walk - but it's still about as close as you are going to get. The locker is free and so are the room safes.
We didn't get to the hotel until 11 pm, but the hotel laid on a snack meal in the room ready for us, also a chilled half bottle of sparkling wine (Cava) which was nice!
There wasn't much in the minibar, and as you might expect, not that cheap. But there is a supermarket about twenty metres to the right of the hotel for those bits and pieces you forgot to bring.
On the subject of shopping. I didn't get the impression that La Massana was a particularly cheap place to shop. There isn't really that many shops anyway. There are, however, three chemists/pharmacies in the main street, only slightly less than ski shops. If there are any bargains to be had, they may have been in the main town, Andorra la Vella - but I didn't want to waste a days skiing wandering around shops, so I don’t' know.
The hotel food may not suit everybody - particularly the evening meal (from 8pm onwards). I personally enjoyed the food during my stay and certainly didn't go hungry. However, there isn't a wide choice of dishes each day; two main courses and two to three starters, on the daily set menu. The menu generally consisted of either haute cuisine or traditional Andorran dishes.
Some of the menu translations were amusingly inaccurate. Our last meal was described as stuffed beef with roast potato, which turned out to be stewed beef with half an apple - it was tasty anyway. If you don't fancy the daily menu then there is more of the same on the full menu. Not a chip in sight, unless you eat off the children’s menu; which I can't comment on further as I didn't look at one, but I did see some kids with chips and what looked like chicken nuggets. The Andorran's don't go in for vegetables much - you could expect perhaps one piece of carrot, one small piece of broccoli and a scrap of courgette. But well cooked anyway.
Breakfast was may also a little limited in choice. There was bacon and scrambled plus boiled eggs, two cereals (cornflakes and a chocolate cereal), toast (twice around the circular toaster to give it some colour) and croissant type pastries. Given that most people have the same thing for breakfast every day anyway - maybe this would be a harsh criticism.
The restaurant staff were very attentive and the service can't be faulted. Most of them speak English, with Spanish the main language with French coming second.
The La Massana area is mostly used by Spanish and Portugese with English speakers the definite minority. This isn't generally a problem as English is widely spoken throughout the resort - we didn't have a problem making ourselves understood during our stay. The main English area in Andorra seems to be Arinsal. Be aware that some holiday brochures describe the Rutllan as being in Arinsal - which it isn't. Arinsal in a few km away.
A common complaint may be the temperature of the hotel - the bedrooms are so hot! I don't think this is a unique complaint, we were in Bulgaria last year and they were even hotter. The Rutllan hotel bedrooms all have balconies, so a few minutes with the doors open cooled the room down to a comfortable temperature. Even with the room radiator, we couldn't significantly reduce the daily temperature of the room without resorting to adding to global warming through the balcony doors.
There are two internet PC's in the reception area. One euro for fifteen minutes.
A pool table (two euros per game), an ancient pacman type game machine and a quiz game machine are along the way from reception - nothing to get excited about unless you have been living in a cave for the last decade.
There is a swimming pool in the hotel grounds - mostly frozen in the winter. It's directly under the ski lift and about three metres from the main road. So, not really that much of an attraction perhaps. The hotel bar is large and fairly typical of hotel bars. Maybe it would have been more cosy and appealing if only there weren't so may kids running around - bless them!
The transfer from Toulouse takes about four hours - which isn't unusual for a ski resort. Don't bank on stocking up on duty-frees on the way back. The shopping at Toulouse airport is quite limited and not duty free anyway, unless you are travelling out of Europe - maybe slightly cheaper than the UK but not significantly I thought.
As for the skiing - well I thought it was good (mid January). More suitable for the beginner and intermediate. The ski area accessed from the adjacent ski lift (gondola type) is bigger than the Arinsal area. The two areas are connected by gondola lift - as long as the weather isn't too bad. It probably took about thirty minutes to get across - including waiting for the gondola to fill; it takes up to fifty people.
On the day we went across, one of the slopes was closed for racing and the other runs seemed rather crowded. The Pal area (which also includes La Massana) was less crowded and more runs anyway.