Best deals in Borovets? Bulgaria's Rila Hotel with dinner and breakfast

Rila hotel is in Borovets which is best known as a ski resort, but you can get a bargain summer week there. We took RyanAir to Sofia, and the bus from the South bus station to Borovets. In June at the Rila hotel we were paying all in about 80 Euros including dinner and breakfast for a double room occupied by two but that was a group of 24, negotiated by our walking group leader who had visited the area to suss it out the year before.

Looking at Tripadvisor for today, you can get other hotels in Borovets at under 100 euros for bed and breakfast but they sell out fast. Hotel Rila was full with a conference until last Saturday - according to those of our group who arrived a day early, but empty on Sunday and another four days we were there.

Rila hotel is vast and we paid extra to be upgraded to a wonderful room, 855 with a fine view of the green slope, a ski slope in winter, but we were there in summer for walking. The upgrade was 10 leva a day. (The previous room was 858, next door to the services room and beyond that an exit.)

What did I like most about the hotel? Food: The scrambled eggs on the breakfast buffet, the slices of grapefuit and orange. Cinnamon pasty at breakfast. Honey at breakfast. Hot cocoa from the serve yourself coffee machien in the dining room.

Prosecco was served by the glass in the downstairs bar, but not in the restaurant.

Bedrooms? The colourful carpet with red and orange strip patterns highlighting the grey. In the bathroom I like the extra shower attachment by the toilet.

Make sure to try the hot Jacuzzi, maybe the cool indoor swimming pool first because I tried the jacuzzi first and the pool was too cold for me, but if you are short of time, be sure to lie on one of the two heated porcelain loungers in the relaxation area. In summer the spa is open 9-8 pm. it is free to guests but if you are at another hotel you can use it for a guest fee.

If you want to opt for one of the paid extras, various massages are offered including Bulgarian rose, or chocolate - chocolate massage for children, too! The hotel also has a nail bar.

I asked the spa manager what distinguished the hotel where he worked from its neighbours. He said that Rila hotel had been recently renovated. One of the guests told me he had stayed at another local hotel and switched to the Rila because it was so clean.

Aound the corner from Rila hotel in the same huge pyramid shape is another modern hotel, the Samokova, named after the nearby town. With a pool and so on.

Other nice hotels in the area are quite different. The Festa Winter Palace, for example, is smaller and older with a small lobby and a domed ceiling in the dining room like a small chapel. The hotel has an indoor pool.

We made friends with an Israeli group who were staying at the Festa Winter Palace, eating a DIY kosher picnic with kosher wine on a hotel public table, in the lobby, undisturbed by the staff.  I asked the group, "How did you manage that?" A buxom lady grinned, "Chutzpah!" (A Yiddish word which translates as astonishing boldness or brazen cheek.) Their tour group leader was Bulgarian.

In one of the shops on the short walk down to the Gondola, I saw and bought
expanding walking sticks with rounded or t shape handles which were 10 leva, about 7 Euros (June 2019 exchange rate). Neither shop could manage a receipt.

The gondola up to the mountain top and back cost 15 leva per person.


Useful Websites For Travellers
ryanair.com
Hotel Rila
www.rilaborovets.com
Festa Winter Palace ski and spa
www.festahotels.com

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, author and speaker, travel writer and photographer, teacher of English and foreign languages to businesses and colleges.

How Your Views Of Hotels Can Change - My Hotel Review of Rila Hotel in Borovets, Bulgaria

I am glad I did not write a review of our hotel on the first night because by day two my impressions of the hotel had completely changed.

Borovets is a ski resort south of Sofia, Bulgaria's capital. From the city you can see the mountains, the Balkans, the Rila mountains. Borovets means pine (tree forest) in Bulgarian. The hotel is the Rila hotel.

Both the Rila hotel, named after the mountain it backs onto, and its neighbour, the Samokovo hotel, named after the nearby town, were built in the same era, the 1980s, according to the friendly and helpful man, Antonio, in the Rila hotel spa.

My first impression of the hotel was not brilliant. The lifts were out of sight of the reception. At the end of the corridor.

Lifts?
To get from reception to the restaurant you climb a spiral staircase. This is a ski resport. Heaven help you if you brought granny to babysit (there is a childrens playroom so they expect kids. Or a skier could have a sports injury and want to go upstairs without hobbling back and forward from the lifts to reception and the restaurant. When we checking out, I discovered they have lifts in the hall but these were being renovated. If I had seen a sign explaining that the lifts were being refurbished, I would have understood and been understanding.

Views?
 I did not like the room beside the noisy service room nor the small bacony and view over the car park, so I popped across to the room opposite and phoned down to ask reception if I could switch rooms. They said the charged another 10 leva (Bulgarian coins) a day for the better view.

We gladly paid to switch to the better view. The big balcony had two chairs - one of which we used so that both of us could sit at the desk typing on the internet.

After switching rooms, we were a lot happier. The room was too hot, and unaccountably the air con did not work because we were told the whole hotel oeprates the air con which is turned off if they deem fit. However, the balcony room door when opened cooled down the room.

Once settled in to a better room with a good view, I was in a better mood to appreciate the colourful red carpet and the knee high shower attachment beside the toilet which turns the toilet into a bidet, the same style as in Singapore and Malaysia.

Downstairs, we met up with our group. Another member of the group had also changed rooms to get away from a room next to the noisy service room.

No - Not Nuggets!
Supper the first evening was a buffet which included only rice, no potatoes, except dried up fries. The meat was dried up beef and dry chicken nuggets.

However, on night two the buffet included super saute potatoes and moist chicken in gravy.