Hotel SB Plaza Europa

We stayed here for 5 nights during the Mobile World Congress trade show, and had a very pleasant, comfortable experience. The staff we engaged with are all helpful, friendly, and fluent in English. As with many European hotels, the room with queen bed wasn’t as huge as many American hotel rooms, but it was very comfortable and the bed was excellent. Best of all, the bathroom was truly separated, by a real door! (We’ve recently experienced the trend of a hotel bathroom being basically a glass box — no, thank you!). Everything was spotlessly clean. Special kudos to the hotel restaurant — we had breakfast there every day, and it was the usual lavish buffet that Spanish hotels offer. But dinner there was truly excellent, with great service. The house-made cheesecake was wonderful, but so was the chocolate ganache with olive oil, bread and salt.

The pool and bar.

Staff were very helpful with any requests or information that we needed for our stay. Nothing was a problem.

The atmosphere

We booked this hotel for a pre-cruise stay - the hotels in the centre of Barcelona were stupidly expensive and we later discovered that there was a massive pharmaceutical conference on in the city over the dates we were staying. We looked at other hotels in this area and settled on the SB Plaza Europa. We were a group of 14 and had a combination of double and family rooms. The double room was amazing - I'm not sure if we got an upgrade but we didn't expect the full size whirlpool bath - sadly we didn't have time to use it. All of the rooms were clean and comfortable. We stayed room only and some of the group did have breakfast for an additional cost. We found the price of taxis into the centre of Barcelona were reasonable, but there were also public transport options available. We went over the road to the shopping centre on the Saturday evening and had dinner in one of the restaurants in there which was nice and convenient. The hotels location also made it very handy for arriving from the airport and also getting to the cruise terminal for our onwards journey. The kids tried to use the roof top pool one afternoon but it was a little bit chill for them, however there were other people in the pool. There were no pool towels on the floor where the pool, maybe because of the time of year. The views from the roof were great, you can just about see the cruise port and good views of the Olympic stadium and Montuic. We would definately look to stay here again, especially if cruising out of Barcelona.