Vilanova Villas and Apartments in Albufeira is the worst hotel I have ever stayed at. We stayed there in July 2004.

The first night we were put in a room overlooking the resort which was incredibly noisy because of music from the clubs outside. One of our beds was also very soft and lumpy. We could not get to sleep until 5am when the clubs shut down.

The next day we were moved to another room, but that night people kept running around the corridor of our block throughout the night. At 4am in the morning we were on the phone to the Thomson helpline trying to move out of the hotel because we could not get sleep.

Our toilet smelled of sewerage, our floor was dirty (my feet would get filthy just from walking on the floor) and our balcony was covered in bird poo.

The pool is the best feature of the hotel - it is very large and surrounded by a nice grassy area. But there is no lifeguard (despite the hotel being advertised as family friendly). Some teenagers were fooling around on a diving board and one of them fell off and cracked his head on the side of the pool. There was blood everywhere and he had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance.

In the final two days of our holiday there was lots of drilling noise coming from the room next door during the day as it appeared that they were installing a new drainage system in that room.

We had paid an occupancy supplement of 126 pounds for our room, but this was simply a con. Our room was no bigger than any other rooms and there was no extra bed. The 126 pounds was so that if there had been a third person staying in the room the hotel would have provided a rollaway camp bed.

This was the worst hotel I have ever stayed at. It was a holiday from hell. I would never, ever take my family there and will never be travelling with Thomson again (it's a Thomson property) as they made no genuine attempt to rectify the situation (they offered us a villa if we paid a 50 pound admin fee or to move us to a hotel of a lower star rating - this was after the first two days of our seven night holiday had been ruined). We are aware that a number of people experienced similar problems at this hotel.