Sue Connor, from Bexley, London ended up sitting in a flat for a week watching television after the luxury hotel she had booked into with a friend turned out to be boarded up and derelict. A woman suffering from a brain tumor spent a miserable week in Tenerife after arriving at her hotel to discover it “gutted” and long boarded up.
Sue Connor, a woman with a brain tumor, flew out to Tenerife for a week. She had just received a life-altering diagnosis and had recently suffered a bleed.
The London woman was concerned that her tumor would soon take her sight. A doctor warned her. She wanted to enjoy some sun, sea, and sand before returning home.
The 42-year-old woman’s long-awaited Canary Island escape quickly became a nightmare after she arrived at Marina Hotel only to find it abandoned and boarded. After falling out with her travel companion, Sue was forced to spend all but €20 (£17) of her cash on an apartment a 30-minute bus ride from the tourist center.
Before flying home to the UK, Sue spent a miserable week in front of the television. She is still trying to understand why Teletext Holidays sent them to a hotel that was long closed.
“I have had a bleed on my brain and a tumor so wanted to come on holiday,” Sue shared her story with The Mirror.
“We were booked into a 4* accommodation with everything on-site but when we arrived the hotel was completely closed down and like a building site.”
“All the apartments had been ripped out and live wires were hanging from the walls. There was a lot of red tape around the pool and old cookers in the reception.”
“I had nowhere to go in a completely different country at 6 pm. I was completely stranded with a brain tumor and no accommodation at all. I nearly collapsed walking around for two hours trying to get back to the airport to go home.”
With coronavirus restrictions on travel beginning to lift in May this year, Sue and her friend decided to fly to the island. They did their pre-departure checks when August’s getaway arrived. Then they boarded a RyanAir flight from Stansted.
Shortly after landing in Tenerife their first inkling of something was not quite right occurred when they discovered that the booked coach had disappeared. A short while after enquiring at the helpdesk, a coach took just the two of them to the Marino Hotel and dropped them off outside.
“The whole front was boarded up,” Sue explained. “A worker let us through the gates so we could have a look around.” The “gutted” hotel that greeted them was a far cry from the four-star accommodation they had been promised.
The hotel was surrounded by barbed wire fencing that ran around the perimeter. It was full of stacked furniture and had been abandoned for some time. Sue and her friend went to an English bar nearby, where friendly people informed them that the hotel was closed for over a year.
One of them helped secure her accommodation in a residential apartment block, which saved her from going home but cost €180 of the €200 she had left. Having fallen out with her pal who subsequently stuck out on his own, Sue spent the week sitting in her flat.
She continued: “Being booked into a gutted hotel is completely unacceptable in any case, but being poorly made it ten times worse. I have had the holiday from hell. I’ve had the worst holiday of my life and am now more stressed than I was before. It’s unfair, unnecessary and most of all incompetent on every level.”