"TLDR:
The good -
Excellent buffet food with outstanding allergy support.
Exceptional sunbeds on the ocean facing side.
Families with younger kids are well catered for.
The beach is very private.
Excellent availability and range of food/snacks all day.
The bad -
Standard family rooms are poor.
Lack of attention to detail in many areas.
Overuse of plastic products.
Chaotic poolside area that is border line unpleasant.
Very average alcoholic/soft drinks.
Breakfast options for cereal lovers is awful.
Orange juice is a payable extra (absolute joke).
Patchy customer service overall.
Smoking areas should be created in the sunbed areas.
As someone that likes to read all the reviews I can get my hands on before I book, I read my fair share about Avra beach. I have to say that much of the criticism is valid, some of it is unfair.
Firstly, the standard family rooms are every inch as poor, outdated, and tired looking as the reviews suggest. This year I was stubborn with my budget and although I did toy with spending the extra £300ish on whatever the next room level up is called, I resisted this temptation and went in with low expectations. As it turned out I have to say that the room was then better than I had pictured in my head, BUT, checking in and being given an actual room key was startling. I don't think I've been handed a key to a hotel room since the 90's! I kind of just stared at it in my hand for several moments. No room in this day and age, no matter how basic, should require a key. Keys are obviously cumbersome, horrible to carry around, and you're charged if you lose it. Secondly, to have a safe that also required a key to operate and looked about 80 years old is also inexcusable. This was the first holiday in well over a decade that we just chanced our belongings in cunning hiding places in the room itself. Beyond that and the aforementioned general basicness of everything in the room and a bathroom that was pretty awful with almost nowhere to store anything, it was adequate. Of course upon exploring the hotel there are some very lovely looking rooms, with lovely card key entry points and fancy displays by the door, but as i mentioned, no basic room should be this bad especially when you're taking about spending 5-7k before upgrades.
The hotel grounds themselves were also a mixed bag. The reception area is small and unassuming. Curiously the outer doors are manual and the inner doors automatic which doesn't create a first impression of any kind of luxury or welcoming touch. Beyond this the hotel is spacious and the grounds are fairly nice, although there were some poorly landscaped areas that were a great example of where this hotel fails overall. Attention to detail. For example, for all the manicured green spaces around the hotel, there are areas of neglect with dirt and rocky verges that were unkempt and unsightly. At the back of our room our balcony looked out to a pair of bedraggled shorts and a towel that looked like they'd fallen from a balcony months ago and just been left there. This leads me onto my next issue. None of the rooms have adequate drying facilities. This is another inexcusable issue, as there are plenty of options available to the hotel, including collapsable or wall mounted retractable clothes lines. This led to people having to dry clothes and towels over their balconies, which created a scene you're more likely to find in a 2 star Benidorm high rise.
The all important pool is just ok. Certainly large enough for most tastes although it get very busy in the afternoons. The biggest issue though is the sunbeds around the pool. There is no designated or controlled method of where sunbeds could go around the pool. This meant that by late morning, you're having to weave in and out of people on sunbeds to get past this area to the snack bars or beach. It was chaotic, untidy, and unsightly. It also made you feel quite intrusive with peoples personal space. This would be easily solved by creating a marked area or raised platform for the beds to go on. This area, like other reviewers have mentioned, is insanely slippery too. It seems like common sense that wherever there is water on marbled or tiled surfaces, it's going to be slippery. This is next level though. I've never seen so many people either slip over or nearly slip over. I have no idea why it's so bad at this hotel as the materials seem the same as you'd find anywhere else. I had to developed a method of walking in these areas like i was skiing or trying to reverse moonwalk to stop myself from going over. It looked ridiculous, but my drinks and knees remained intact.
Beyond the pool area things improve dramatically. The hotel has a lovely spot where you can be in the sea within a few paces of the pool. This is also where the best sunbeds are and honestly, as someone that's stayed in resorts in the Caribbean and Asia, these were probably the best sunbeds I've ever had the pleasure of vegetating to a sunburned crisp on. Be warned though, to get the best sunbeds that sit on the ledge between the pool area and the beach (of which there are maybe 70), you need to be down on them by 7.30. The sunbed situation in general was extremely changeable no matter where you wanted to lounge. Some mornings they were gone by 7.00, others by 8.00 and some days you'd find beds well beyond this. There's a guy that patrols at 8am on the dot and removes the belongings from any beds where at least one person isn't standing guard. The only other thing to mention here is smoking. I feel like the hotel needs to make a smoking area for sunbathers. I find smoking pretty disgusting, and had to contend with discarded cigarette butts in the sand around the beds, and plenty of selfish smokers happily puffing away around families and kids who had to deal with their second hand smoke. I don't recall ever having this problem in other places before.
On to the food. The snack bar and drinks bar were well stocked with plenty of choice and queues, although always present, went down quickly. The customer service at both of these sites was very average. The snack bar in particular had some very prickly ladies staffing it most days I was there, even shouting at a line of customers on one occasion. Had they been wearing name tags I would have named and shamed them. There was sometimes a young guy on who was perfectly fine, and late afternoon/early evening there was a guy who would take over who was much more warm and pleasant. The bar staff had similar issues. Half the time they looked like they'd rather be anywhere but here. Unfortunately, it pulls down the overall experience as a guest, particularly as it's human nature to remember the bad things.
My daughter has allergies and when we met with Kostas he was exceptional at making sure she was catered for for the whole week. There was a lovely lady on the pancake station who would remember us each morning, and have egg free pancakes ready for her which really made her day. When we booked the ala carte restaurant, the concierge made sure she recorded the allergies and made notes for the chef team, who then went the extra mile by making her bespoke dishes where she couldn't have something that was on the pre set menu. It's moments like this where the hotel shows its quality. It makes it all the more frustrating then, when you receive poor service in areas where expectations are simple. Be greeted with a smile and be warm with interactions. The snack and drinks bar fell well short of this.
For lunch and evening meals you are pretty spoiled. With all inclusive buffet food, by definition you know pretty much what you're going to get. It's batch cooked food on a large scale. However, this is easily one of the best levels of buffet food i've ever had. Food is highly subjective to people, but you'd have to have impossibly high standards to bemoan the choice or quality. Everything is very well labelled for allergens (for the most part) so you can choose with confidence. The ala carte restaurant serves as a relaxed lunch venue during the day, and the food here was amazing. My only complaint was that they didn't enforce a slightly tighter dress code. I'm all for someone dressing how they please, but there was an awful lot of dressing for the body you want and not the body you have. Outside of a lunch venue, more power to you. inside one, I really don't want to see the things I saw while i'm eating my delicious gyros. Easily solved by requesting shorts and t shirt over the swim wear.
Breakfast is a big one, the most important meal of the day some say. Well that's great if you don't like orange juice or breakfast cereals. This is my only severe criticism of the food overall. I have never in my life been to an all inclusive that charged extra for fruit juices. I had to pick my jaw up from the floor on the first morning when the waitress told me. Out of principle I'm not paying for orange juice when I've paid several thousand pounds for all inclusive already. Absolutely shocking. I've never been one for cooked breakfasts. I love muesli, fruits and granolas and I simply was not catered for here. There were some sorry looking oats which certainly weren't muesli. No granola of any kind and only a basic selection of breakfast cereals clearly aimed at children. The fruits available were a kiwi simply chopped in half and then grapefruit. Who the hell likes grapefruit?? Frustratingly during lunch and dinner service, pineapple, watermelon and other melons are available. I associate those much more closely with breakfast and have no idea why they aren't available then.
With the lack of OJ and as a non coffee or tea drinker, that meant that I either had water, or could help myself to the absolutely awful self service carbonated "stuff" that came out of the dispenser. Which leads me onto the drinks. Overall the drinks are terrible here. Everything tasted so cheap and artificial. I don't drink alcohol, but my wife went through everything on the menu several times (must have been why she was always so chipper) trying to find something decent on the cocktail menu. She did say that the wine was surprisingly decent considering the quality of everything else. Me? I stuck with draught Pepsi Max for the duration. One tip there though, in the hours that any of the drinks dispensers are available use those over the bar. One other thing of note is the plastic use. For a beach front hotel to use plastic spoons and straws also contained in a plastic wrapper is completely disrespectful of the beautiful environment the hotel occupies. Why straws couldn't have been paper and the spoons metal or wooden I do not know. I suppose its the same financial decision as the orange juice, and it is a poor one from Avra beach. If they can't love their environment why should anyone else?
Overall the hotel has plenty to be proud of, but is frequently a let down at the same time. It's buffet food is some of the best I've ever had, but let down by average drinks. The location is lovely, but let down by aesthetically poor choices and lack of attention to detail, and a busy pool area. The customer service can go from moving the earth to make you happy, to shouting at it's customers who just want some waffles. My overall score is a little harsher than I would want to give. I just can't get past the room key, the chargeable orange juice, the amount of cracks under the veneer, and the customer facing staff who let their colleagues down with their poor service."
