"Beautiful, peaceful hotel – but be prepared for the prices
We stayed at OKU Kos for 7 nights as a couple and overall had a really relaxing and enjoyable stay. It’s a beautiful boutique-style hotel with a chic, understated feel, and the adults-only setup makes a huge difference. The atmosphere is genuinely peaceful and restful – exactly what you want from a relaxing holiday.
The beach is lovely, with soft sand, comfortable loungers and plenty of shaded spots if you need them. There aren’t other resorts immediately around the hotel, which means it feels wonderfully quiet and secluded. The outdoor pool is also very nice, with plenty of good-quality loungers around it.
Breakfast – a real highlight
Breakfast was probably one of our favourite parts of the stay. There’s a fantastic choice of both hot and cold food, including Greek yoghurt with an enormous selection of toppings – nuts, fruit, sauces and jams – as well as different breads, pastries, overnight-oats-type dishes, eggs, sausage, beans, tomatoes, fresh orange juice and cucumber water.
The coffee service is a nice touch too. Rather than being completely self-service, a member of staff comes over when you sit down, takes your coffee order and brings it to you. It feels much more like a restaurant experience, although if you’re a big coffee drinker, it would be useful to have filter/drip coffee readily available rather than having to order each cup.
Food and drinks – tasty, but very expensive
This is probably the biggest downside of OKU. Once you’re inside the hotel, almost everything is extremely expensive, so it’s worth going in knowing this.
You get a 750ml bottle of water placed in your room each evening, but otherwise bottled water is around €6. Poolside food is also very pricey. For example, the katsu sandwich was around €27 and came as four very small squares, with no chips or side dish. It was tasty, but the portion simply didn’t justify the price in our opinion. A bowl of chips was around €10 and smoothies were around €14, which we didn’t feel represented particularly good value. Even a 330ml beer was expensive.
The wine selection, however, was good and the wine we had was very nice.
We ate dinner at the hotel on three nights. You’re asked to reserve a table, which we did, but on each occasion we still waited around 20 minutes for a table. Unfortunately, the dinner service was quite poor during our stay. The menu is expensive, and although the food was generally tasty, some dishes felt overpriced for what they were. The calamari we had was slightly chewy and lacked flavour, whereas the pork belly was absolutely incredible. The chef’s specials also tended to be some of the better choices.
One tip: avoid sitting on the platformed beach area for dinner. We were absolutely eaten alive by mosquitoes there. The decking was much better.
There was also a BBQ evening during our stay instead of the usual dinner menu, priced at €70 per person as an additional charge. We didn’t opt for this.
Rooms
The rooms are very well equipped and housekeeping was excellent. Everything was clean and well maintained. There was a good-quality hairdryer, toiletries including shampoo and body wash, toothbrush, comb and shaving kit, as well as an iron and ironing board, safe, TV and air conditioning that worked well. Shower pressure was super.
There’s also a coffee machine and the pods were replenished, plus a very good-quality Marshall speaker, which was a lovely touch. The minibar is there, but again, the prices are high.
Spa and gym
I had a hot-stone massage during the stay which cost €160. It lasted longer than an hour and was genuinely high quality, with an excellent masseuse, so I felt this was much better value than some of the food and drink prices.
The gym is quite small and lacks some equipment. It could also get very busy in the mornings, so if you’re someone who wants a proper gym workout every day, it may be a little disappointing.
Leaving day
One thing we really appreciated was the flexibility on our final day. We checked out at 11am, left our luggage with reception and were able to continue using all the hotel facilities for the rest of the day. Before heading to the airport, we were able to use the spa showers and changing facilities, which made travelling home much more comfortable.
A few tips for your stay
If you want to experience some food outside the hotel, Taverna Perismo is about a 30-minute walk away and is absolutely worth it. We had an incredible, authentic Greek dinner with multiple courses for around €30–40, which felt like a fraction of the cost of the hotel restaurant.
They also do chicken gyros for just €5, and they were so tasty – a great option for a cheap, authentic and filling Greek meal.
If you walk left along the beach for around 15 minutes, you’ll reach Namaste Beach Bar, where you can get reasonably priced drinks and lunch. The chicken gyros there were particularly good.
We also hired a moped for a few days and used it to visit a nearby supermarket, where we stocked up on things like Alpha beer and local wine. This was a very easy way of avoiding paying hotel prices for every drink.
One final thing to be aware of: check the final bill carefully and remember that VAT/taxes are added. There is also a tourist tax payable on arrival. For our 7-night stay, this was around £90.
For context, over the 7 days our hotel bill came to approximately £940 including VAT and our two massages. This included three hotel dinners (sharing a starter, having two mains and a bottle of water each time), around three lunches between us (only ordering one meal to share) , one bottle of wine, two smoothies, two coffees, four cocktails, a few bottles of water and the two massages.
Overall
OKU Kos is a beautiful hotel and a fantastic place to properly switch off. The peaceful adults-only atmosphere, beautiful beach, stylish surroundings, excellent breakfast and comfortable rooms make it a very relaxing place to stay.
Our main criticisms are the very high prices, disappointing value for some food and drinks, and inconsistent/slow dinner service. If you’re happy to pay premium prices and occasionally eat and drink outside the hotel, these things are much easier to manage.
We would definitely recommend OKU for couples looking for a peaceful, stylish and relaxing break – just make sure you budget for the fact that the hotel itself is very expensive once you arrive.
Overall, we had a lovely 7-night stay and left feeling genuinely relaxed, which is ultimately what we were hoping for from OKU."
