"FIRST IMPRESIONS:
Don't be fooled by the lovely lobby and lounge area when you arrive!
Within the first ten minutes of arrival at the hotel, we got a very unpleasant surprise of a 'Tourist Tax' the hotel apparently charges, which is an extra 15€ a night, so instantly we had to pay an extra 210€! This tax was not advertised anywhere, we were not told about this by TUI, who we had booked with, it was nowhere on the website for this hotel, we checked the whole website. We hadn't even received our room key yet, although someone from the hotel had already taken our suitcases from us. this was all less than two minutes after the hotel staff had told us to go and sit down in the lounge area and relax, as we were on holiday. Of course we had no choice but to pay this.
we had no idea where anything was in the hotel, as no information was provided besides when the restaurant was open.
getting around the hotel and out to the street is very difficult. Again we had to figure this out on our own to avoid walking down the very steep hill that leads to the hotel, just to get to the beach and surrounding shops. this involved going out through the lounge, across the pool area, down to the ground floor accommodations, then across a bridge with a steep set of stairs. Im lucky im not currently reliant on a wheelchair as this would have been impossible to do, all ramps around the hotel are also very steep.
THE ROOM:
the room was very dated.
the 'Mountain View' we booked was non-existant. all we could see were trees and a few houses in the area. we were on the first floor, and directly below us was a dumping ground for all the hotel's broken and unused rubbish, often saw the staff taking the bins out too.
this was a further frustration as large lorries would turn up around 12:30am, making a lot of noise. we specifically chose this hotel as we didn't want to be around the noise of active night life areas, so this was not a nice thing to be woken by.
the walls are so thin we could hear those in the next room talking, coughing, arguing, can hear toilets flushing etc. we also had a room that had a connecting door to another room, so the noise was even more disturbing as the sound came through the connecting door louder.
Only one plug socket by the bed, unless you want to unplug the light from behind the end table.
Balconies were not private in any way, the glass screens are missing a panel at the top by some sort of weird design choice, and the balcony next to ours extended out past ours, meaning that the occupants of that room not only could look onto our balcony unobstructed, but had a direct view into our room.
we also came back once from a short time out and found that our second key card has been taken from the room. Reception didn't care or try to give an explanation, they just gave us a second key card. this added the stress of someone we didnt know having a key to the room as the old keys weren't deactivated. They also didnt ask for any forms of ID, so we could have gone up to them and told them any room number and acquired a key for that room! security clearly not an important thing to the staff.
like a lot of Crete, you can't flush toilet paper. The bin provided is not a sealed container, so toilet paper has to be put in an open topped bin which is highly unhygienic. The seperate bidet was incredibly difficult to use, as my husband is very tall and wide chested, and i am disabled, so both of us found using it very difficult, it's not easy to move from one to the other. The pressure on the tap also disappeared after a couple of uses, so getting clean was so difficult.
Towels were very small. we found slightly bigger, yellow towels in the cupboard, but i think they were meant for the pool.
Large TV in the room, but a little complicated to use, also the outlet had come away from the wall where it was plugged in, which can be so dangerous.
the second night there was a strange popping sound that started up, going off every few seconds, almost like a speaker was trying to connect to something, but we couldn't find the source of it
CLEANING
for the first week, the maids only came in to straighten the bedding and empty the bins. by day 4 we realised that the floors hadn't been cleaned/swept/vacuumed since we had arrived and horrified when we moved one of the chairs and realised that there was a massive build up of dust under the table/chair area that was clearly more than the 4 days we had been there, and we also realised they hadn't actually cleaned the bathroom at all either.
the bedding and towels were only changed once during the 14 days we were there.
DINING AND FOOD.
a pretty good selection of food, like most places, i feel like the 'cold food' comments are more due to the fact that it takes time to go around and pick out the food and to the table, that the food cools before you get to eating. We came at a time where the evening meals had a weekly rotations, but most of the choices are meat based, so i feel Vegetarians and vegans would have a difficult time finding anything other than the salad to eat, and even then a lot have meat included in.
Dietary/ allergy information was very confusing.
We had a few nights where the glasses hadn't been cleaned and were dirty."
