Bulgaria Ski discussion board

Right here goes,
I stayed in Borovets, in the Samokov Hotel for a week from the 3rd Jan 2009 to 10th Jan 2009. We travelled with Crystal Ski and were diverted to Borgas Airport and delayed 24 hours due to heavy snow at Plodiv and Sofia. But that’s another story.
I stayed there with my wife and took no children. We’re both reasonably well travelled people, but more used to Summer holidays than winter ones.

The Samokov Hotel, it a large imposing hotel pretty much in the centre of Borovets.
It’s position is ideal in that it is directly opposite the Gondola lift.
Our room was a double, in that it had two single beds, it faced towards the front of the building and had a balcony, toilet and bathroom and was located on the 4th floor.
The room itself was reasonably sized and clean. The door did not appear very strong and there was a gap at the bottom you could limbo dance under. The décor was somewhat dated although perfectible functional. A TV was present, and appeared to be reasonably modern and you could view about 14 channels. Unfortunately Euro News and BBC News 24 along with another channel which occasionally showed films were the only English speaking channels, but again this has been our experience elsewhere in Europe too.
The beds were reasonably comfortable but starting to sag and show their age. Pillows, well unless you take your own, it’s very difficult to find ones that match what your used to. Sheets, there has been reports that the sheets in this hotel were well worn, all I can say is that the sheets we had appeared relatively new, although they were of the “textured” linen type, which I suppose could be mistaken for worn or over starched. The biggest problem however was that the sheets were not big enough to allow them to be tucked in enough, so half way through the night your bed resembled a bowl of spaghetti !!
The room was well heated, we were never cold and it was never really over hot either so that was fine. The lighting in the room is dim. There were a total of 8 spot light but you would really have had to have them all on to read in the evening with a degree of eye strain, other than that it wasn’t a problem.
The toilet functioned well and was separated from the main bathroom by a wall and a door which is a real plus. The bathroom had a sink and bath with shower over in with a mirror and a wired in hair dryer and shaving socket. All worked fine apart from the usual it would seem for this resort in that the bath is not sealed in anyway so you have to be careful showering not to flood the room and the bath and sink were void of any plugs and after several requests I eventually got a plug for the bath only.
Top tips for the bathroom, if you use the shaving socket to charge anything, like an electric tooth brush etc, you must leave the bathroom light on as turning it off isolated the power. Also take a good sized bath towel as the little towels provided are somewhat inadequate.
The balcony was fine and the height of the wooden barrier was safe however, small children should be supervised as it offered climbing points. There was a minor draught from the patio window area but not really noticeable especially with the curtains drawn. Top Tip the balcony acts as a nice fridge or refrigerator depending on weather.
Top tips for your room. Take a mini travel kettle, some tea bags or a jar of coffee and some sugar. Milk is available from the hotel shop or resort “supermarkets” so you can have a nice FREE cuppa when ever you want especially before you’ve woken fully up first thing in the morning. Better still take a flask with you and avoid being ripped off when out skiing.
Although smoking is allowed within rooms and pretty much everywhere in the hotel, our room did not smell thankfully.
Overall the standard of the room was on a par for Eastern Europe and in comparison to some accommodation offered in Croatia for twice the price seemed very comfortable.
By UK standards though it is no more than 2 / 3 star.

The main hotel was clean. The main entrance was probably the best maintained as you’d expect but even then if you looked closely you could see signs of aging and poor maintenance such as the brass hand rail around the reception bar was broken and hanging off and looked like it’d been that way for quite some time.
Staff at reception seemed friendly and smiled for the most part, although I had made a point of smiling at them and tried to be as friendly as possibly in light of previous comments about poor service.
In reception there is a travel centre which we never used so can’t comment and a member of staff providing free cooked pancakes and fresh rolls. He again was very helpful and friendly and the food was great, but there again you have to pay for this service and the price now is 3 lev for a pancake where it was only 2 lev a short while ago.
Moving onto the restaurants in the hotel. The main one which as a half board customer we used, is located off the reception area. It’s a large room as you’d expect and in the evening live music is provided to a reasonable standard. The range of food is reasonable and you’ll find a reasonable amount which you’ll recognise. The quality of the food varied. Bread on the day it’s delivered (Saturday) it fantastic, however it does not get delivered again till the following week so by Tuesday it’s getting stale and by Friday it’s cardboard. There’s always a range of fruit and various mini cakes for desert and soup it offered during evening meals. Breakfast consists of scrambled eggs, bacon, mushrooms, bread, and a couple of cereals along with some more European offerings such as cheese, meats etc.
Now as to the foods temperature, at best it’s luke warm. It does not matter if your in for first sitting at 6pm or the last sitting at 10pm it’s not acceptable. A microwave was available but disappeared by the Friday. What makes this situation even worse is the fact it doesn’t have to be this way. The food is heated by hot water held in heaters underneath the tray of food. When the trays get emptied and replaced a shallow amount of water was observed which barely had steam rising off it, indeed my washing up water is hotter than that. So for the addition of some extra water and the thermostat being turned up on the heating element we could have had piping hot food.
There was one occasion on the Friday the food was hot, and low and behold when the empty trays were removed deep hot steaming water could be observed.
One thing which is totally unacceptable in today’s society in any communal eating place and that’s smoking. A large foreign gentleman joined our table to eat and half way through stopped and lit up a cigarette sorry that’s just foul. At very least separate facilities should be provided for those who cannot last half an hour without lighting up . The waiter staff however were very difficult to warm too. Even though I tried to make eye contact and smile at them and thank them when they removed our dirty plates it was usually just met with a blank forward stare or frown mind you this could be due to us not ordering drinks at meal times as this is where your waiter expects to be tipped.
There is another restaurant on the 9th floor called the panoramic restaurant. We never ate there but have heard reports the food it much better and hotter there. Call me slightly cynical but could the “half board” restaurant be seemingly offering deliberately cold and limited food so that you went upstairs and spent even more money buying food which you’d have already paid for in the price of your ticket??
The hotel has a spa centre, swimming pool, sauna and steam room. The swimming pool appeared reasonably clean by UK standards and smelt reassuringly slightly of chlorine although no life guard was present when we swam.
The pool temperature was posted on the wall as 27 degrees, but like the food it was no where near this more like 17 degrees, it was warmer than cold but no by much.
8 lev (£4 ) will buy you access to the sauna and steam room. In the sauna there is no facilities to add water to the coals, so it was a rather dry heat, the sauna’s not overly large either for a hotel of this size and anymore than 6 people in would have been cramped. I believe that a swimming costume or towel is required in the sauna and steam room unlike some western European saunas where nudity is often mandatory and the norm. The steam room was of a similar size. The spa offers a range of massages and not having had one before we both paid 40 lev (£20) each for an hours all over massage . For the men, there is a older man perhaps in his 50’s and very wrinkly with a big moustache who provides a very energetic but very relaxing massage and for the women there was a small and pretty young lady who according to my wife was very gentle and soft with her…….damn!!! I think I got the short straw !!
A clean pair of underwear is all that’s required to be worn for both men and women and for this price you can’t beat it. There is also a wider range of other therapies available but can’t comment on them.
The Hotel also has a small indoor air rifle range and bowling alley with games room, both seemed basic but adequate although we never used them. There are a couple of shops on the ground floor of the hotel, but prices yet again were not good and many items were very obviously fake i.e. O Neil sunglasses for 15 lev (£7.50)

In short the Samokov fulfils it main role as accommodation but it is no way near 4 star, more like 2 / 3 star. I think this has been said so many times now and is the main source of gripe for many that people like Crystal Ski should start advertising the UK equivalent star rating in their brochures so at least people know what they’re getting. Not to seems to be misrepresentation to me.

The resort is situated at about 4500 feet altitude on the side of the Rila mountain range. The mountain is sheer beauty incarnate. If you get a chance just go off for a couple of hours and walk one of the many pathways through a white winter wonderland, silent with the occasional bird song. The resort centre in comparison to us seemed like a blot on the landscape. There is a multitude of places offering “genuine” Sunday roasts and real “Tetley” tea with music pumping out and neon lights and a multitude of hawkers trying to entice you in sometimes multiple times in an hour depending on how often you walk by. In the end we opted often for walking back via a back road to avoid this Many restaurants offer what we termed the salmonella pig, a pig or several chickens or both on a spit over an open fire so one minute it was red hot and the next it was freezing cold. The shops were full of fake and copywrited goods at way inflated prices with some goods illegal in the UK such as extendable batons and CS canisters, my advice stay well clear.
If you want to shop got to near by Samokov town. We brought some gloves there for 7 levs in Samokov market which were on offer for 20 lev in resort and this is fairly typical for the price difference. You can get there either by Taxi or by bus (our method of travel) The bus stop is outside the Ela Hotel opposite the Samokov Hotel and picks up every half hour. The bus looks more like a beat up old Sherpa minibus but it works and for 2 lev each way it’s one of the cheaper things in the resort.
There are plenty of cash machines and they’re easy to use either for credit or debit cards. I used the one in the entrance to the Ela Hotel without issue other than note the 5 lev charge for each transaction.
As for short changing this only happened once and it was at the Blue Bar. I think this may have been a genuine mistake on behalf of the bar person as it was a whole 5 levs !! no problems when he realised though.
As for drinking places I’d say avoid the buz bar. It currently advertises a free drink with a coupon on the back of a après ski booking form. When I took that in they refused to honour it and then charged me 5 lev for a 330ml bottle of Bulgarian Beer which on average you can get 500mls for 3.5 lev every where else.
I would recommend the Sunski Pub right opposite the Samokov Hotel for their hot wine. It’s a nice reasonably quite family type bar owned by two brothers, one a Ski instructor the other a retired police officer. The only draw back was seeing “Pills” being peddled by the girl who’s job it was to entice you in.
Boro sport are the main organisation in Borovets. They operate the ski lifts, run ski schools / instructors, seem to employ the security staff amongst many other things.
We had limited interaction with their staff, but in that time we found some of their none ski instructor staff rude, abusive and on one occasion threatening. It’s clear that they have one objective and that’s to relieve you of as much of your cash as possible.
The Ski instructor weekly show organised by Borosport which lasts a little short of a hour but is as exciting as watching paint dry will now set you back 25 lev each and the mafia is out in strong force making sure you don’t glimpse a look towards the show from a distance for free. A senior Borosport male staff member and an teenage girl with attitude made a right spectacle out of themselves threatening people who gathered at a distance to watch . If you’re a non skier and want to go up in the gondolier you can but the walkers pass has been withdrawn so now you have to buy a half day pass for 28 lev (£14) I had to ask myself why? But the answer is obvious as my wallet became that much thinner.
It’s also interesting to note that there is a high number of high spec vehicles apparently owned by the operators within Borovets from Hummers to top of the range BMW;s Audi’s, Merc’s etc. Certainly when you see the poverty in the rest of Bulgaria, some people are getting very rich of the back of this Mountain.
I also heard a number of families complaining that the numbers in their ski school groups with borosports were almost 20 in number and that thy’d spent most of the day standing around. Personally I’d avoid Borosport the schools with the Rila or Samokov Hotels seems to have a far better rep and a number of people had booked private instruction once they arrived which seemed to work well for them, with freelance ski instructors being easy to find.
The best day we had was when yet again one of the many après ski events, in this case a departure shopping trip to Plodiv, Crystal Ski cancelled, because there wasn’t a big enough profit margin for them we went and found a kindly old guy, a taxi driver we’d spoken too the day before. His rank is outside the Victoria Hotel at the bottom of the resort. My wife and I hired him to take us to Dupnitsa some 50 kilomteres away instead for a shopping trip, with him and his wife who also came acting as guides and translators and then calling in at Samokov on the way home too. Samokov is where he lived with his wife and after calling in at the supermarket there to buy our duty free alcohol (a litre bottle of whisky for 9.8lev (£4.90)!!) he invited us back to his apartment where his wife cooked us some genuine Bulgarian food, and we drank our way through some incredibly strong home brew all for no extra charge. It was a delightful experience and a proper taste of real Bulgarian hospitality, a real gem of an experience and all that for 80 lev for the day for both of us (£20 per person) and we were going to pay Crystal £16 just to shop. If your interested his name is Christo Milushev and he can be found or contacted via the Victoria Hotel, his gsm is +359887848175 or his land line is 0722/65324. He speaks good English and is fully insured. Once again thank you Christo and his wife Slavka, you made our holiday.

In summary would we go back, the answer would be yes if I wanted to learn to Ski in the next couple of years but only if the price differential between Bulgaria and the more traditional Ski resorts remained significantly in Bulgaria’s favour.
Sadly however I fear this will not be the case in a few years time and I predict most of the patrons left with be very wealthy Eastern Europeans. Although the Mountain is beautiful and excellent Skiing, the standard of the rest of the facets of the holiday are below what you’d expect even for the money today let alone the money that will being charged in a few years time which is a great shame really. I believe this process is already happening as Christo was telling us the Hotel Victoria only had about 4 guests in and the whole resort was very quiet in comparison to previous years.

I hope this review has helped

No worries guys. I used this site a lot before going to gain as much info as possible and it was a help but it took a while monitoring posts to get all the info I wanted, so i decided to put it down all in one place
Sorry it's a bit long, but it could have been much longer as i was going to talk more about the Apre ski events available like skidooing for 1 hour £31 per person or the absolute must 2 hours snow board taster including instruction and equipment hire a bargin at just £15 and the hilarious Rubber Ringos and bum boarding........oh I'm doing it again ..... now where the I went ou for earlier