Terralta Apartments

The only reason I would give this 9/10 is the Hill. The apartments were first class, the staff were very friendly and accommodating and the food in the restaurant was good and reasonably priced.
The front was about 15 - 20 minutes from the apartments going down and about twice as long coming back. There is a bus that runs from the complex to the New Town and back. As the apartments are in the residential area in the Poniente side, there are no local bars or restaurants apart from the one in the complex itself. However the bus and taxi fares were cheap enough, with taxis constantly dropping off in the grounds.
We booked independently with flights by Globespan and had our airport transfers with shuttlebus.com. We were met at the airport by taxi and were in the apartments 25-30 minutes later. On the way back the vehicle was a 7 seater Mercedes with blacked out windows. All in all a first class holiday experience.

I stayed here in August 2005 for 2 weeks with my husband and 2 children, aged 5 and 4. We absolutely loved the complex, the accommodation was fantastic and probably the cleanest/largest we’ve ever stayed in.
The rooms were very well equipped with an electric hob, toaster, kettle, microwave plus much more. There were 2 large sofa beds for the children and a main bedroom with plenty of wardrobe space. The balcony was very big and had a large clothes rail. There was a sky television for anyone who wanted it, and also internet access. The maids came couple of times during the week but you could get clean towels any time you wanted them.
The pool was fantastic, it was very clean and large with a shallow end for the children, plus several water features, there is also a separate children’s pool, a Jacuzzi, and an adults only indoor pool. The pool operates a strict no inflatable policy which was really nice as you didn’t have idiots running and bouncing onto them from a great height! There was a poolside bar for ice cream, beer etc and also a poolside restaurant to have a meal if you preferred. The only downside was that the restaurant was no smoking so you had to go outside if you wanted to eat and smoke - you then had to order from the takeaway menu though which was a bit annoying as my husband does smoke.
There was a full time lifeguard on duty from 10.00-18.00 daily, and there were numerous games activities put on for the children during the daytime indoors and outdoors.
My 2 made plenty of use of the children’s clubs, which were extremely well run. They were on for 3 hours a day except on Thursdays which are the reps day off. In the evening the hotel run entertainment seemed quite popular but we did only stay in a couple of times so I can't really comment.
There is a courtesy bus that stops right outside the hotel driveway which runs into the Old town, Centro, or the New Town. It runs from 9.25am every hour until 20.25pm. Adults and children pay 90 cents each no matter where they wish to go. Alternatively taxi’s cost 3 euros to the Old Town and approx 6 euros into the New Town which is where all of the British bars are.
We did venture into the Old Town on several evenings for traditional Spanish, Norwegian food, but if you don’t like European food then you’d better not venture down there as it does cater for the Germans, French, Spanish etc more so than anyone else.
The New own is where all the Nightlife is, there are plenty of British pubs, and clubs with a huge variety of entertainment. As I was 6 months pregnant at the time though we didn’t go into many of the clubs, we preferred to eat in the more family-run establishments.
We had some fantastic meals, and only had two really bad meal during the fortnights stay. We had bad meals at The Grand National because my little lads shepherds pie was totally raw with red mince, we had to send it back but the waiter wasn’t really very nice about it. The other bad place we ate at was a surprise because a lot of people on the complex had recommended it - it was Tony Romas American style Ribhouse. The food was slow arriving, but worse than that, was the fact that when I took my daughter down to the toilets the men’s facilities were 'out of order' so men and women were sharing the same toilets. We wondered why the men’s were out of use, but through the cracks in the door we saw 3 big cockroaches run up and down the paintwork - this really put us off, and if we hadn’t already have eaten our meal we would have left immediately.
Some of our best meals were at Hogwarts, we ate there 3 times and I definitely recommend it, the layout and service were excellent and you will not be able to finish everything that is put in front of you. The Magic Roundabout is also very nice and caters more towards families.
The weather in Benidorm was superb, the people at the hotel were extremely helpful and polite and we would definitely go back there. You may have read about the dreaded hill to the hotel but it honestly isn’t that bad, we tackled it on several occasions with 2 youngsters and my massive tummy but as long as you don’t try and race up there in the beating midday sun it is totally fine.
If you haven’t booked your accommodation yet then I definitely recommend the Terralta Apartments.