"Let's start with the positives: Well-kept grounds, modern rooms with spacious bathrooms, empty fridge to use in the room (but few alternatives to the expensive mini-mart outside the hotels within walking distance), mostly friendly service staff in the restaurants and by the pools, enough pools and loungers, decent quality and variety of food at the buffets, good selection of a la carte restaurants.
A few smaller niggles:
- There are no real double beds, only pushed-together single beds, with a sizable gap in the middle that cannot be closed up
- During the first half of my stay, the wind was so strong, it was quite uncomfortable to use the Village Pool and the beaches, and even the pools that are further inland got a lot of wind. The resort cannot be blamed for the weather, but maybe more thought should have gone into choosing a plot of land for the resort; the Robinson Club on the south side of the island is much better protected from wind.
- All pools were too cold to enjoy in mid September. Heating large outdoor pools is of course very expensive, but should be considered at a 5 star resort.
- One machine in the gym was broken during my entire stay
- While the walls and balcony door of the room offered good noise isolation, the front door did not. I was woken several times by housekeeping and other people outside my door.
- A detail, but it shouldn't happen in a 5 star resort: the battery of the scales in my room were empty, so the scales were not usable
Depending on your room, you will have little privacy on your terrace or balcony, and if you are really unlucky, your ground floor room will have a terrace that is actually below ground level, so your eyes will be level with the grass. A true 5 star experience...
I am not a beach-goer, but I think people loving beaches will not have a great time here. You have the choice between a big stretch of beach where you have to climb over/through large boulders, placed there to slow beach erosion, to get into the water, and a small stretch without rocks where sun loungers are packed closely together to make the most of the available space.
F&B pricing is a weird mixture of suspiciously cheap and way too expensive. It was disappointing that Coke Zero was offered nowhere in the resort, only Coke Light.
A big issue is the layout of the resort. It is very 'deep', while not being very 'wide'. This makes sense from a real estate point-of-view, as beach-front land is much more expensive than areas further inland. For the guests, however, this comes at the cost of big distances to cover within the resort. From a first-row apartment to the tennis courts you walk over ten minutes. From the children's area to the beach, it's also ten minutes - of course on uncovered paths, in the heat of the day. This adds up, and becomes pretty annoying. (if you want a laugh, have a look at the neighboring hotel, Smy Kos, on Google Maps - it's even more grotesquely formed).
A further downside of this inconvenient layout is that probably less than 10% of the rooms have sea view. Not acceptable for a five star resort, where sea view from most if not all rooms is a central part of the experience. I did not book this vacation, but would personally not book this resort for that reason alone.
But now for the main issue: the attitude of the 'white collar' staff. From our first correspondence with NLR months before our stay, through all the way to check-out, the attitude and communication style of the reservations department, guest services and reception were characterized by an arrogant, flippant, even derogatory tone.
You don't have to believe me, just read NLR's replies to critical reviews, or even single critical points within reviews, here on TripAdvisor, on HolidayCheck and Google; guests are being schooled like little children: "you didn't read room descriptions properly", "we repeatedly informed you that", you misbehaved in this or that way, etc. Confrontational language like "clearly" and "even if" is used frequently in writing to highlight how they are right and the guest is wrong. This would be inappropriate for a two-star bed&breakfast, but it is absolutely unacceptable and highly unprofessional for a five-star resort. Communicating in a courteous, de-escalating manner with guests instead of 'firing back' to show how you are right (and the guest would know it if only they would read properly...) is Hospitality 101, even if it is incompatible with the general attitude of Greeks, which is not a friendly, service-oriented one, as I unfortunately had to learn over the last 30 years.
Hiring and training standards must be quite low at Neptune Luxury Resort. Maybe Mr. Zarikos should rather invest in that, and not a ridiculous APT video where everyone involved looks like they'll be fired if they don't smile...
Overall, it will not surprise you that we cannot recommend NLR."
