"This was our third time in this hotel and, while we had a good enough stay and there is still much to appreciate, it is clear that the negatives are starting to outweigh the positives and we would have to find a very good offer to consider going back again. First of all, the assertion in other reviews that this is a "German" hotel and that British guests are somehow disadvantaged is simply untrue. Every announcement, every sign, all entertainment is in English as much as in German and I estimate that, this year at least, less than half of all guests are German. There is a very large Turkish contingent (some of which, true enough, are German-Turkish), the rest coming for the most part from Russia, the Balkans and Central Asia.
The hotel itself is unfortunately starting to look a little shabby around the edges. It's still immaculately clean and the gardens are beautifully maintained but the room furnishings have seen better days, our bathroom wouldn't have looked out of place in a 3-star hotel (one of the knobs fell off the shower on the first day, also some mould issues in the shower and the door was chipped and warped). The toilet seat didn't match the shape of the toilet bowl, so not only looked like an afterthought but was pretty uncomfy. The towels were hard, scratchy and stained. We were only left two large towels (and two pairs of slippers) for a 3-person room (although last year we got no slippers at all, so we thought they had stopped giving them out). The pool area, too, desperately needs maintenance: badly chipped, broken and loose tiles in and around the pool are a hazard and should be fixed as soon as possible, rather than just setting a warning cone down in the vague vicinity. Our child ripped her swimsuit and badly scratched her back on the slides.
Other negatives: the staff are definitely less friendly and helpful than in the past. Having arrived early in the morning, we were told to come back at 2pm to check-in, since the rooms weren't ready. I arrived duly at 2pm to pick up my room keys, along with another guest who had been told the same. The older lady at the front desk told us impatiently that she had to wait to hear back from cleaning staff, told us to sit down and wait for a moment and then disappeared. We waited for almost 30 minutes, being completely ignored, before we went to the desk again. With no apology at all, we were immediately given key cards to rooms that evidently had been free and ready all along. The restaurant staff are incredibly hard-working and busy but also (in part at least) lack service skills. No smiles or greetings. On at least 3 occasions at lunch, we had no drinks service at all and had to get up and go looking for something ourselves. On another 4-5 occasions, we were almost finished eating before a waiter approached us and offered to bring drinks. At dinner, we were only offered a second drink twice. We used our pool towels for as long as possible because the spa staff were so aggressively pushy with their sales pitch when we went in for new towels. The photographers were similarly insistent. The animation staff (with a few exceptions) were also listless and disinterested. At the little dance routines on the bridge for example, they all looked utterly bored and miserable. The bar staff, in contrast, were all friendly - although here, too, I have to say that the over-the-top flirting by some with our teenage daughters made us all very uncomfortable. Possibly quite innocent in some cases but there is simply no need for a lifeguard to ask our 14-year-old what her name is and how old she is before telling her that he's 20.
Our room this time was especially noisy. The walls are very thin - we knew this from our last visits - but this time in particular, maybe because we were on a lower floor - we could literally hear the neighbours using the bathroom and snoring. We also had problems with the air-conditioning, which was not adjustable at all. You could press any combination of setting buttons and the result was always "arctic blast", without exception.
The food in the restaurant is still good and tasty but can become monotonous after a week. The labelling of the dishes is also utterly random and rarely had anything to do with the actual dish. There are still some "theme" nights, notably "Fish Night" (with the world's worst sushi but plenty of other fish dishes), "Turkish Night" (like every other night but with flags) and "Mexican Night". The bars now have a new "Signature Cocktails" menu, with some very tempting drinks, and also have ice coffee and slushies. The afternoon snacks at the pool have also really improved in variety, and ice-creams and ice-lollies are also available now while the pool snack bar is open.
Other things that count against the Diamond Premium is the free-for-all smoking around the pool (although this could well be the standard in Turkey) and for some people the location. Personally, we like the location, since it's not in the middle of the hotel jungle that dominates other parts of Side, but it does take a good 70 minutes by taxi from the airport (or two hours+ by package-tour shuttle bus) and there are no shops or other facilities around at all. Sunbeds are impossible to come by after 9:30 or so, especially on days when many beds are cleared away for the foam party). You don't get the sunbed wars here that you see elsewhere but there is much mass reservation of sunbeds early in the morning by guests who don't arrive until the afternoon. Some guests reserve themselves several beds each to make sure they can switch between sunshine and shade. It's a pity that the hotel allows this.
In a hotel this size, there is always going to be a clash of cultures and hell is, as they say, other people, but it is also disappointing that hotel staff don't step in more to counter the anti-social and at time even hazardous behaviour of some guests - like the wannabe influencers who picked the gorgeous hibiscus blooms off the bushes to decorate their drinks for instagram posts; the family who had a water fight in the pool with as many of the little cups of drinking water as their arms could carry; the groups of grown men commandeering large parts of the pool to throw heavy, hard balls around, with small kids being mere collateral damage; the boys jumping head first and doing somersaults into the 1.4-metre-deep pool from the top rail of the bridge (encouraged by their parents and on at least one occasion also by the animation staff). The hotel now posts lifeguards at the pool for a couple of hours during the day at least.
Unless we find an unbeatable offer for next summer, we are unlikely to return to the Diamond Premium for a fourth time, since it no longer provides the good value for money that it did two years ago. The shine is off and the hotel no longer seems to be putting the effort into providing guests with a premium product."
