Lindos Royal Resort

"I read a lot of reviews before choosing to stay here, and based on the enthusiasm of my travel agent I decided to assume that the bad reviews were just picky. How bad can it really be given it's rated 4/5 star? The answer is very bad, I should have listened to the reviews. TripAdvisor, to its credit, rates this hotel 3 out of 5 which is probably bang on. The hotel, to its own credit, ignores this entirely and continues to describe itself as luxury five-star accommodation. I stayed for 9 nights in May for our first wedding anniversary and first family holiday in a couple years having previously preferred Canary Islands. I'll start with the positives: the view from the à la carte terrace is genuinely beautiful, as are the views from around the hotel generally. The bar staff and several waiting staff are lovely. On several evenings they put baklava out at the buffet, which were delicious, especially given the general lack of quality Greek food most the time. Strangely also the Asian a la carte was exceptionally nice. NO AIR CONDITIONING We arrived to be informed, with the breezy confidence of someone announcing a minor schedule change, that the air conditioning wasn't on because they don't turn it on until June. It was 23-25 degrees in the room at midnight even with the balcony door left open. They'd also run out of fans, I heard countless guests complaining about the temperature. The temperature at breakfast in the buffet was 27C according to a thermostat I found on the wall. The hotel's position was that our travel agent should have warned us so not their problem. We should have been better prepared to stay here. We did get a fan on our third night I think it was, bafflingly at around half past midnight just hours after getting the fan, the front desk rang the room whilst we were asleep to ask if they could have it back! Why on earth they thought we wouldn't still need it is beyond me, and even more confused why they thought it ok to call my room and wake us all up. I complained in writing about this incident but never got an acknowledgement or apology. ROOM QUALITY The shower had no door, so the bathroom flooded every time we showered. The bath plug was broken; they had provided a rubber replacement that popped out the moment you ran the tap. The main door lock was broken, so they'd fitted a bolt to the inside — the kind you'd find on a garden shed, which is fairly on brand for the general maintenance standard of the hotel. Walls were marked and wall paper torn. Bedding was stained or had holes in, and towels were also stained or threadbare. The housekeeping team have no idea how to make a bed as the sheets were not put on right and kept coming off. As far as I can tell the sheets were not changed either once in our 9 night stay. One morning housekeeping forgot to replace a pillowcase entirely. The room also had no kettle, though given what the water tasted like, this may have been a mercy. FOOD The buffet advertised themed nights. I cannot tell you what the themes were. One evening appeared to be "beige." Another may have been "pasta, again." Greek food, at a Greek hotel in Greece, was present in theory and absent in practice. The olives were so aggressively salted that eating any could land you in a stroke ward at the hospital. The feta was cheap, the edam was strangely bouncy. The tzatziki tasted of very little, certainly not remotely Greek or authentic. The nights baklava appeared caused something of a frenzy, I heard one older lady declare those were the best nights of the holiday as it was something she actually liked. If you are vegetarian you need to like salad, and chips ideally. You are going to eat salad, mostly the same salad every single meal. There is no variety, and the vegetarian options they do offer occasionally are not nice at all. The fruit juice at breakfast came from a machine and was undrinkable, truly vile. It tasted like neat orange squash with salt added. The water at breakfast was also strangely salty. Whilst they serve bottled water at lunch and dinner, that apparently is impossible at breakfast for reasons I don't understand. I did see some people getting bottled water, but perhaps they were Italian who get special treatment at this hotel. A note on service in the main restaurant, there isn't any. When asked (if asked) what you would like to drink, order several drinks each. And don't forget bottle water to wash away the awful salt fake Pepsi/Fanta taste. The waiting staff if you do get their attention for a second drink, likely will never bring it, assuming you even get their attention at all. There are seemingly hundreds of staff running around in all different uniforms but I've no idea what they all do. Side note, I saw one member of staff walking around all day long the same circuit around the hotel with a clipboard, no idea what she was doing either, just looking busy I guess. Maybe she is quality control. WINE & COCKTAILS The wine was closer to vinegar than anything else, it is disgusting. The rose is almost drinkable but tastes like a £4 bottle from a discount supermarket. The cocktails — and I use the term loosely — were dispensed by machine, containing what I estimate to be a capful of alcohol combined with 2kg of sugar and a bottle of syrup. They are weak, no alcohol, and taste awful. If you want a drink with actual alcohol then ask for a mixer such as Vodka and "coke". I watched what I took to be a manager observing the pool bar one evening carefully, at which point the drinks got noticeably weaker. The bar staff were lovely though. PEPSI Everything is Pepsi, or quite possibly fake Pepsi as not even that tastes right for Pepsi. The orange Fanta and lemon Fanta are clearly not Fanta. All the soft drinks taste of soap and salt, and all served in toddler plastic cups. If you want actual Pepsi that tastes like Pepsi, assuming you have accepted your fate with regard to actual Coca Cola, then you can get it in the a la carte restaurants but you have to pay for it. A LA CARTE The à la carte restaurants are not really à la carte. You get shared starters you didn't choose and a selection of three mains. Fine. The Asian one was, against all odds, very nice. The Mediterranean restaurant was mediocre, as a vegetarian I had mushrooms for every course, literally the same dish - cold for starter, warm and bigger for main. The Greek restaurant was an embarrassment to the concept of Greek food and to the country of Greece more broadly. The gyros was dry and seasoned poorly, my wife left all of hers. I'm vegetarian. I asked the waiter if there was a vegetarian option. He looked at me like I had gone insane. He suggested, with apparent bafflement, that perhaps I'd like noodles. At a Greek restaurant. I asked, gently, whether there might be something actually Greek, halloumi perhaps. I know it isn't Greek but given that we were approximately 40 miles from Cyprus, a country that has built an entire identity around a grilled cheese, and it goes well in gyros this wasn't unreasonable. The suggestion did not land well. The waiter was in fact quite rude for the remainder of the evening. It's 2025. Vegetarians exist. We've existed for quite some time. You could serve halloumi. You could do a spanakopita. You could slice a tomato and drizzle olive oil on it and I'd have been grateful. Instead: noodles, and a waiter who made me feel that requesting food I could actually eat was an imposition on his evening. Drinks aren't included at the à la carte either. There's a passive-aggressive sign about "serious tax implications" if you bring your all-inclusive drinks in from outside. I looked into this. It is not a real thing. The wines are priced accordingly — €48 for Prosecco, if you're interested. I paid €18 for a rosé that tasted awful. CROSS CONTAMINATION On a rare identifiable themed night at the buffet there was an Asian theme where they served sushi. Whilst waiting for more vegetable Sushi I noticed that they used the same chopping board and knife (both green not blue) to cut both raw fish and crab as the vegetable. The vegetable Sushi were then placed in direct contact with crab sticks. I would note that preventing cross contamination is not a quality issue, it's the law throughout Greece and the European Union. If basic food hygiene falls apart at the sushi station in plain sight, I'd have real concerns about what's happening in the kitchen. If anyone in your party has a serious allergy, eat elsewhere. Every meal. MOSQUITOS AND BUGS The mosquitoes at the Lindos Royal are not an occasional nuisance, they are everywhere and monstrous. My wife and I were covered in bites from the moment we arrived and were actively swarmed every evening. The entertainment area in particular, the Calypso bar where they run the nightly shows, is apparently their preferred gathering spot. Which brings me neatly to the entertainment. On the topic of bugs, a huge beetle randomly appeared in the bathroom having crawled out from under the shower on the first night. Subsequently cockroaches appeared from time to time, I mentioned it to reception and they just congratulated me for getting rid of it... ENTERTAINMENT The children's mini disco play the same five or six songs every single night, with no real effort to engage with individual children. My daughter Aoife is six. Nobody from the entertainment team sought her out, learned her name, or made any attempt to include her in the way you'd hope. Meanwhile, a subset of children received sustained personal attention from the entertainers throughout the stay, for reasons I cannot work out. They sat with families at dinner, sought out by name, or one to one at the pool together. Whether there's some arrangement behind that, I genuinely don't know. Really unimpressed by the children's team, they seemed more interested in each other and chatting and having a laugh than entertaining children. Once the mini disco is over the regular entertainment is poor. But it is loud enough that going to bed early to escape it doesn't work either. You lie in your sweltering, un-air-conditioned room listening to the entertainment, while simultaneously being eaten alive by mosquitos that have followed you back from the Calypso bar. Incidentally, the Calypso bar sounds very nice in writing, but it is channeling underground car park vibes, its dark and dingy and smells damp. After a big rain storm I observed multiple members of staff frantically sweeping water (and hundreds of bugs and cockroaches) out of a cupboard all over the bar floor. Strangely, the hotel also has a stunning amphitheatre. Proper stage, good capacity, beautiful setting — the kind of venue that could host a genuinely memorable evening with proper shows. They do nothing with it. It is used exclusively by an Italian tour operator for their own private events, for their own specific guests. Why a Greek hotel on a Greek island has handed its best asset to an Italian tour company for the exclusive entertainment of Italian guests is a question I cannot fathom. I have been to hotels that are 4 and 5 star at the same price point that have acrobats and performers coming to do shows who would be incredible in a setting like that, instead the Italian guests get an amphitheatre whilst the rest of us get an X-Factor drop out, at an underground car park style bar, whilst being eaten by mosquitoes, without even the sweet release of a Pina Colada to make the evening more enjoyable because we've all got diabetes from the sugar. POOLS / LOUNGERS Unheated. In 29-degree sunshine the water was cold enough to take your breath away. The tiles around the pools were smooth, wet, and genuinely dangerous to walk on. The loungers all had exposed metal where the frame folded so I saw many people injure themselves, and when you weren't being injured they were very uncomfortable. The loungers just weren't the quality you'd expect for this star rated hotel and price point. The lifeguards were physically present near the pools. Whether they were watching them is a separate question. At least one emergency button was smashed and appeared non-functional. Pool towels required a cash deposit, could only be exchanged every other day, and the exchange had to happen at the spa. The woman at the spa seemed as tired and confused by this policy as I was. ANNIVERSARY As mentioned this was my wedding anniversary, I had attempted to arrange a package to mark our first wedding anniversary. The hotel offered it and I agreed. On arrival though nothing had been prepared, they had put some flowers on the bed but that was a thing they offered already not part of the package I agreed to pay for. They promised me a nice wedding anniversary, we love Greek food so we booked the a la carte for our wedding anniversary (and final night). They promised to make it special, to give the best table, flowers, candles, make it really nice. They even said whilst we were out they would make the room nice, and I tidied the room before going out to be sure it would be. I checked in with reception the day before, and the day of my anniversary to make sure they remembered, they assured me they had. We arrived at the restaurant to find "Anniversary" written beside our name in the booking sheet. The table was ordinary so far as I could tell, not reserved for us, not special in any way. The room, when we returned, was untouched. This was genuinely upsetting, the anniversary food at the Greek restaurant was terrible, the waiter was rude, and no one wishes us happy anniversary despite having it written in front of them. No one did anything at all to make it special, it was very upsetting for my wife and I. You can't demand freebies of course, but surely include an €18 bottle of Rose, a glass of Prosecco, even some flowers or a candle, literally anything to make a guest stay memorable. Nothing at all. This is not the experience of a 5 star hotel, or a 4 star hotel, or even a 3 star hotel. My daughter tried to tell the children's team it was our anniversary hoping they'd do something nice, they didn't acknowledge it. On a previous holiday she told the children's team of my birthday and I got dragged onto a stage and happy birthday sung, and a whole bag full of random hotel branded swag given to me. At this hotel it was barely eye contact, certainly no congratulations. SUMMARY The Lindos Royal is not a bad hotel by accident, it's a bad hotel by choice. Every cost that can be cut has been cut. Every machine that dispenses a smaller pour than a human would has been installed. Every opportunity to do something well has been weighed against the cost of doing it cheaply, and cheaply has won, every single time. There are easy cheap things they could do to elevate the experience of guests, but they won't. Like all reviews this review will get a reply thanking me for my feedback and promising me they will pass it on to improve things, but they won't. There are countless reviews saying the same things I have. Don't stay here, go literally anywhere else, if they had Travelodge in Rhodes I'd recommend there over this hotel. I rate my experience 2 stars, I rate the hotel 3 stars if I am being very generous."

"In the glossy brochure of modern travel, the term “Five-Star” is tossed around with the reckless abandon of confetti at a shotgun wedding. It implies a world of effortless luxury, where your worries are ironed out by a staff that anticipates your whims before you have even fully formed them. Sadly, the Lindos Royal in Rhodes is a five-star hotel only in the minds of its marketing department and whatever bureaucratic committee hands out plaques in Greece. Clearly, the product teams at easyJet Holidays and TUI, who brand it as a five-star resort, have probably never actually spent a night here; to award this property such a rating is an act of pure, optimistic fiction. A cursory glance at the collective outcries from May’s TripAdvisor dispatches confirms the reality: it is a perfectly respectable, hardworking 3.5-star establishment. To compare it to a true bastion of luxury, such as an Ikos resort, is like comparing a reliable family hatchback to a bespoke Aston Martin. They both have wheels, but only one makes you feel glad to be alive. Our descent into this velvet trap began at check-in. We had travelled to the Aegean for our daughter’s wedding, burdened with seventy kilograms of luggage, essentially an entire haberdashery of formalwear. We were escorted to our booked 'Deluxe Sea View' room, a space so comically hostile to storage that it offered a single wardrobe and two lonely drawers. It was entirely untenable; a space designed for two ascetics with a single loincloth between them, not a British couple attending a Mediterranean marriage. Yet, out of the architectural bleakness stepped the resort’s true saving grace: the Front Office Manager, Valasia. Where the room's infrastructure failed, she triumphed. Confronted with our logistical nightmare, she did not hesitate, haggle, or resort to the usual bureaucratic shoulder-shrugs. With a sharp, decisive efficiency that belongs in a much finer establishment, she immediately upgraded us to a human-sized room. It was early in the season, thankfully, but her flawless professionalism single-handedly saved our holiday from curdling into a disaster in hour one. Beyond the reception desk, where Ivan was most helpful and polite, dispensing the sort of smooth, unflappable charm usually reserved for handling erratic minor royalty, the hotel’s aesthetic foundations are genuinely satisfactory. The pools are good, not pristine. They provide a sprawling labyrinth of azure water kept clean and treated, but very cold. The buffet food, too, is a triumph of volume and decent flavour; you will certainly not starve, nor will you ever be surprised. It is plentiful and varied, a vast geography of sustenance. However, while the structural cleanliness of the dining room is nothing short of exceptional, the atmosphere refuses to rise above the clatter and echo of a municipal canteen. The staff do their absolute best, scuttling about with the frantic energy of un-nested ants, but they are fighting a losing battle against the architecture of mass catering. Furthermore, the resort stumbles on the most basic hurdles of presentation; they cannot, it seems, be tasked to wipe the water spots from the plates. Instead, they provide stacks of paper tissues at the side of the crockery mountain, inviting guests to manually polish the damp drips off their own plates before loading them up with moussaka. It is a marvellous touch of five-star DIY. A special shout-out and heartfelt thank-you must be extended to Stavros. He navigated the breakfast chaos with a perennially warm smile and an enviable, razor-sharp efficiency, even managing the minor miracle of remembering our absurdly complicated coffee order day after day. It is a testament to his character that he managed to inject a necessary dose of humanity into what otherwise felt like a military feeding operation. The dining room is also the only time during the day you are permitted to glimpse a drink served in an actual glass. To obtain a proper vessel anywhere else, you must subject your wallet to a premium surcharge in the lobby bar. For the British traveller, this triggers a very specific, tribal sort of psychological trauma. There is an unwritten, sacred contract embedded in the British soul regarding the "All-Inclusive" holiday: we pay a king’s ransom upfront precisely so we can leave our wallets locked in the room and live like medieval lords. To be told that our prepaid status only entitles us to plastic, and that glass requires actual cash, is an ideological mugging. It goes entirely against our national grain. We aren't being cheap; it's the principle of the thing. Why am I paying a premium to drink out of a glass when I already bought the entire hotel for ten days? Where the staff are heroic, the hotel’s corporate policy operates like a miserly accountant. True luxury includes; it does not ration. For example, the hotel’s climate control is governed not by the actual, sweltering Mediterranean heat, but by a rigid, bureaucratic calendar. The air conditioning remains legally dead until the first of June. By a marvellous stroke of calendar coincidence, that happens to be today, meaning the switch will finally have been flicked, but for those of us visiting in May, guests were trapped in a claustrophobic catch-22: sweat it out in a sealed room, or open the balcony doors and invite the local insect population inside. Foolish travellers, unaccustomed to the climate, sat with lights blazing and windows wide, leaving the mosquitoes to zone in like heat-seeking missiles on the rising plumes of human CO2 and perspiration, treating the unventilated rooms like an all-you-can-eat buffet. The result was a horrendous menagerie of lower-limb carnage; we witnessed some truly horrific, swelling bites on fellow guests. If you are reading this before travelling in May next year, it is vital that you pack your DEET, accept the heat, and do not subject yourself to this trauma. Better still, Lindos Royal, simply factor a few extra euros into the room rate and activate the climate control early so your paying guests can sleep with the glass shut. To add insult to injury, a scan of the small print reveals a charge of thirty-five Euros simply to use the room safe. It is the hospitality equivalent of being mugged by the person holding your coat. Then we come to the liquids, and they require no sommelier to diagnose their shortcomings. Here, we entered the realm of the "part-time all-inclusive." At lunchtime, the draught beer and wine possess the distinct, underwhelming character of being aggressively watered down. Two pints in, and you feel entirely unchanged, save for needing the bathroom, largely because the drinks arrive not from a bottle but via the depressing hiss of a pressurised soda pump. The cocktails, meanwhile, are a transparent joke, syrupy, neon concoctions engineered by automated vending machines. Occasionally, these are poured into a metal shaker by a remarkably friendly and helpful bartender who shakes it with tremendous, theatrical gusto in a desperate, valiant attempt to convince you that some actual human labour went into making your drink. Ultimately, it is a grand performance of illusion, and we found ourselves escaping the resort grounds in the evenings simply to discover what a proper, un-watered drink actually tasted like. Not saying they are, they just taste like it! There is a distinct lack of poolside service, forcing guests to fetch their own drinks in plastic cups like thirsty schoolchildren. Once back at your station, the battle for survival begins in earnest, courtesy of the hotel's ridiculously miniature parasols. Providing next to no sufficient shade, they force you into a weary, hourly game of high-stakes sun-bed chess, shifting your lounger around like a heavy plastic piece on an azure board, trying desperately not to breach a neighbour's square. Fortunately, it was quiet during our May visit, but one shudders to imagine the territorial warfare that must erupt here in the height of summer. The management urgently needs to scrap these pathetic canopies and invest in umbrellas of a civilised size. As it stands, a terrifying number of my fair-skinned compatriots simply abandon the shade altogether, choosing instead to lounge until they resemble a colony of aggressively boiled lobsters. Worse still is the utilisation of the resort's spaces. The lobby bar is arguably the most elegant, visually stunning architectural asset in the complex. Yet, because the hotel demands a premium cash surcharge for a proper glass, it sits completely deserted. It is an unpopular concept, so the finest room in the hotel sits entirely devoid of life, a monument to corporate greed. Ultimately, the Lindos Royal is a lesson in expectation management. If you come here expecting the seamless, friction-free paradise of a true luxury resort, you will find the micro-transactions and mechanical cocktails an insult to your intelligence. But if you accept it for what it truly is, a clean, sun-drenched, friendly 3.5-star resort with spectacular pools and exceptional staff like Valasia, Ivan, and Stavros, you will have a perfectly grand time. Just make sure you pack some mosquito spray, a heavy dose of patience, and for heaven’s sake, don’t arrive until June."

"I was so nervous coming here after reading all the reviews but we have had an amazing time. The rooms are a little dated but you can see that they are working on these to bring them more up to date. Normally as a family of 4 we are all squashed into 1 room but with the family room they have a sliding partition which acted like a second room. To be fair we were never in our rooms. The swim up rooms look amazing I wish we would of booked these instead The food has been lovely I have 2 very fussy children who have a very beige diet. There was something here for them to eat every day, the pool bar snacks changed every day and they were always happy to make something fresh if you preferred. Also of a day I preferred to go to main restaurant at lunch where there was an option for fresh home made pizzas in the ovens these were the best pizzas ever. Around the food area there was always someone from the kitchen re filling the stations The staff all over the hotel never stopped working and nothing was never to much bother. I had an issue with our safe which was fixed within 15 minutes. We are not really big drinkers so tended to sit on the area above the bar on the couches which was always very relaxing. Lindos is only a 5 minute Taxi drive so we went there for 2 nights in the week There is always plenty of sunbeds which ever pool you are at. They are always cleaned every morning I would say the hotel is more like a 3/4 star rather than a 5. The views from hotel are amazing and it is the most relaxed hotel Iv had in a while I would recommend this hotel as we have had such a lovely time"