Hotel Melia a Santiago

This is one difficult review to write as I always like to say as many positive things in my reviews. However, this has to be said if only for the hotel to improve their service and/or re-evaluate their culture. I was excited that this hotel was a Melia hotel because we've stayed in Melia hotels in Spain before and were very happy with our experience. Here is one beautiful, modern hotel that we looked forward to staying in especially after our Camino Walk. I checked in our group of 9 ahead of the others and was efficiently attended to by Pilar and Lourdes at the Front Desk. The hotel offered a lovely breakfast spread. That's where all the positives stop, I'm afraid. That night, we booked for a late dinner to celebrate my son's birthday and the end of a tiring Camino Walk. While seated at the long table in front of the bar, we were subjected to very rude treatment by the waitress named Marta. When one of our companions asked for an extra soup bowl, she said it was impossible. To give her the benefit of the doubt in case there was a misunderstanding in language differences, my friend asked our Spanish tour escort to ask the waitress for our bowl. The next thing we saw was our tour escort being rudely treated by the waitress speaking to our tour escort at the bar, telling him off. We understand some Spanish but what we saw from the body language and our tour escort backing away from the wait staff spoke volumes. He was being harassed by the wait staff. All we asked was for our tour escort to ask our waitress, Marta, in Spanish for an extra soup bowl. And we saw very aggressive behavior directed at our tour escort. She handed our tour escort a sauce dish, not a soup bowl, that's how offensive she was. When he told Marta that he wanted to deal with another waiter Christian (the other wait staff who was also there with Marta) told him, pointing at Marta, ”she's the boss”. Where was customer care in this scenario? If Marta refused to attend to our needs, why couldn't Christian attend to us? Two of us went up to the bar to talk to Marta and Christian when we saw what was going on. When I asked her what her problem was, Marta glared at me and said she didn't speak Spanish and went away. I took out my phone and typed on Google Translate: ”Be kind. You are in Customer Service. Where is your manager?” I showed it to Christian since Marta refused to deal with us. A bit later, Pilar from Front Desk came and talked to my friend and me. We told her that we didn't want trouble but that this massive, massive failure in customer service must be addressed. Pilar was very defensive of the wait staff but she did listen when we insisted. When we asked for a manager, or the Officer-In-Charge, we were told that there was no manager on hand. All the staff, all, covered for one another. It made us wonder about the culture of the company. To make things worst, 2 of our orders were not served and we were charged for the orders. It is a good