We stayed for six nights (from nov 3 to nov 9) at the Hotel La Aldea in November.
The only thing i can say is that this was our worst hotel experience.
First we have to say that we have paid $180/nigth for a room with Jacuzzi, so what we were expected was a really $180 room in every aspects. Some facts that we would like to share:
- When we arrived the room was so dirty that we asked to the staff person if any cleaning was made.
- Hot water...... just for one....the first one. The second person will have a great cold water shower.
- The breakfast that was included in our rate had no choice. Better, you can choice between Ham, Bread or Cheese. Ok, you can also choice some dishes from the dinner of the day before your breakfast.
- The food served at dinner was included in the rate but had no choice. Some days maybe you get lucky and you will have 3 options to choose.
- The internet is included in all rates and you don't have to pay for that. Fantastic. But it's so slow that we have to wait 5 minutes to open a page like Hotmail.com. I give up and went to San Pedro where you can find good internet places that offers you internet access for a good price.
- The staff is a joke. They are not professional workers. I don't have words for this.
- The pool ..... good size but the color was green. Not blue like a cleaned pool.

This was we could get for a $180 room.
In the first day we couldn't understood why they asked us to pay all the 6 days stay in advanced. But quickly we understood why ! because this way we couldn't go to other hotel.

One last thing. The hotel is not in San Pedro but in Solcor. A village near San Pedro.

Its beautiful when you pull up...but you quickly begin to discover...only the outside is lovely! First....its far out of town...a real hassel since there are no taxis or lights on the road at night. Second the white sheets look like they have not been bleached in years giving you the feeling of sleeping on someone elses yellow dirt.
Third, there was a hole in our ceiling that meant that bugs and dust dropped on our heads all night! We told the management and they said "oh...yeah....that." No one ever fixed it and they could not change our room.
But, worst of all, this family run hotel is run by a family that seems to want to work as little as possible. On weekends they refuse to work (even though they live on premises and are always around.) This means you can not make a phone call (since that can only be done through the office) or send a fax. I needed to send an emergency fax on Monday morning....to provide medical care for my young son with his grandparents, and despite knowing why I needed to send the fax they refused to send it before 9am! Just because they were eating breakfast!
I paid $150 per night and could have had better service in the $20 per night hostel in town!

This hotel is very beautiful and authentic to the region. However, the management is horrible. We were only 2 of several guests who had a terrible time trying to communicate with the staff. Many people were given rooms that were different than what they had reserved. We never got the room we reserved, were put in a smaller room, then, half way through our stay, we were shifted to a cabana due to the management making so many mistakes with so many people's reservations. One man came back from an excursion to find his luggage out in the sand. The management thought he was supposed to have checked out when in fact he was scheduled to stay another day and night. The morning that we had to leave was a complete nightmare. The person at the front desk had no idea how to check us out using a credit card....he had to send someone into the main part of the town to wake up the only employee who knew how to operate the credit card machine. This took almost an hour and we almost missed our flight.

The previous review written for La Aldea is all true except that we had a worse experience at La Aldea. First of all, it is hard to communicate with the staff because only one person there speaks any broken English (fortunately for us, I speak Spanish), so if you do not speak Spanish you probably will not be able to communicate with the staff. What was the worst thing that happened to us was that they tried to over charge us at check out by over $1000 US! They quoted us $260 each day for 3 people for a guide with excursions on an e-mail that fortunately I saved and had with me. I wrote all my correspondenses in English and Spanish to be very clear. Instead of charging us $260 each day X the 3 days of excursions we had, they said they were going to charge us $266 EACH PERSON EACH DAY! I showed the e mail that clearly did not say "each person". Then they tried to charge us an extra day for the days we were traveling to and from the airport in Calama 1 hour away. Think about it this way: The driver drove 1 hour to pick us up, one hour back once he got us, took us back to Calama and returned the vehicle to San Pedro. This equals 4 hours total driving time. This should count as 1/2 a day. To top that off they never mentioned that in the original quote to us that there was a charge for the airport transfers. We were only told about that at check out. To summarize, our checkout took 2 hours of arguing with the staff, we paid for the pick up from the airport and paid $266 for 3 days of excursions and we found our own transport back to the airport that amounted to $21 US total for 3 people and lots of luggage. This is only because we were very determined to not overpay and refused to pay any more than what they originally quoted us other that the driver's time the day he picked us up.
The computers still are unplugged, the lounge area is still unappealing to relax in, the dinner food has no choice and one night was served cold when it should have been hot, the standard rooms are tiny and dark with no storage space, there is not always hot water or any water pressure to take a shower, and the breakfast could greatly be improved upon.
The 1st night we were there, they did not have room for us so they took us to different hotels. We stayed at the Kimal which is 180 degrees different than La Aldea and was a pleasure to stay in with great food. Stay at Kimal.