Avra Beach Hotel

"Short: Great all-inclusive hotel, clean rooms with excellent food. Busy pool but loads of good loungers at the beach. Fabulous entertainment crew. Long: Room is good size, plenty space for family of 4 (plus cot) however severely lacks storage space, especially hooks to hang towels on and a rail outside to hang wet swim gear. A row of 5 hooks along an empty wall would make a huge difference! A full length mirror in the main bedroom area, away from the bathroom would also be appreciated as only mirrors are near the toilet and no natural light! Room was cleaned daily and towels replaced when needed. Even on our last day, they cleaned our room and gave us fresh towels as we had a late check out. You can pay €7 an hour to keep your room if you have a later flight home - it was brilliant and worth the money! Due to layout, I think it would potentially be awkward if travelling with older teens/4x adults as there’s no privacy but this was not an issue for us as our kids very young. I had emailed in advance to request a pram-accessible room, with cot and a kettle. Also requested to be away from main road. We were in a superior garden family room (606) and it was ideal. View looked out to garden at side of the property and borders on to higher buildings beyond but to be honest we kept our curtains closed 95% of the time in order to keep room cool when A/C not on so view did not matter too much for us. The terrace outside included tow chairs and small table. A wall drying rail, that can be seen on the main hotel room balconies would have been ideal! Correspondence with hotel was excellent and answered all my queries. The hotel itself is very nice, the grounds are kept very clean and pool is religiously closed at 6pm for cleaning every evening. We arrived very late at night due to delayed flight and check in was swift, however we felt we lacked information about what was available and where. The pool is a good size and has a very attentive lifeguard majority of the day. There is a distinct lack of sunbeds around the pool, and one side has loads of table/chairs that are quite uncomfortable and stay empty majority of the day. Wish they swapped these out for loungers. Towels out down on loungers and left are removed at 08:15 but even with that, it’s very difficult to get a lounger by the pool. The sun loungers on the beach are far comfier but not ideal when your kid wants to be in the pool all day. Small shallow baby pool and main pool gets to a depth of 1.4m. Beach is gravelly/pebbles so beach shoes a must! Sea is lovely but can get quite choppy depending on wind. We found the food in the main restaurant (buffet) very good. There is a theme every night (Mexican/rhodian/BBQ) alongside amazing salads. As a vegetarian, the salad options were brilliant but I did feel like the main hot food did not cater well to non-meat eaters. If you have fussy eaters, there’s the standard nuggets/chips/plain pasta but I don’t think they particularly cater well for small kids. I would have liked to see some baby facilities like a microwave. The Greek/italian place is great for lunch each day. You can either easily sit there under cover, or takeaway food to sit elsewhere at the resort. Great pizza/gyros/chips/pasta salad plus good selection of fruit including beautiful watermelon. Snack bar has sandwiches, waffles, cakes, ice cream available all day. Wish there were ice lollies for the kids as ice cream is poor quality and melts in 30 seconds. Drinks are available from the main bar and snack bar, as well as self service at the Greek/italian place. We found almost everything to be carbonated and very sweet, hard to find normal fresh orange/apple juice for the kids but they do make a cute kids punch that my daughter loved. We went start of July and do think they could operate with more bar staff as often only one working so can be slow to be served. We were not fussed by lack of brands and happy with local beer but you can pay extra for particular drinks. Social media is a bit deceiving as frozen cocktails not included as part of all inclusive. As part of your all inclusive, you get a night at their à la carte restaurant. I do feel this is mid-sold as it’s not à la carte, but rather a set tasting menu, set out as sharing plates. The menu is all meat main courses with the proviso that dietary requirements can be catered for. In comparison to the four different meats, I had one mushroom risotto. It all takes quite a long time, over an hour for drinks and starters, and honestly not ideal for people with young families. I think had we known, we would have gave it a miss. Our eldest (age 6) fell asleep at the dinner table waiting for her mains, and we ended up skipping dessert. Beautiful place to watch the sunset though! We holidayed with our 6 year old and 3 month old children. The kids club is open all day and you can just pop in and out as you wish. Irina was amazing and my daughter was like her shadow. She had a wide array of crafts she made across the week, and thoroughly enjoyed the pizza making (happens on a Wednesday) The entertainment team all round are superb, very happy people who go out their way to make your kids feel included and get even adults involved in all sorts of activities including water polo and darts. The mini disco is at half 8 and lasts less than half an hour. Wish it was a little earlier but it’s well attended, and they do face painting before it too. The entertainment team is off on a Thursday, so it would be a good day to arrive! We found all the staff at Avra beach to be very helpful and polite. Always greeted with smile, and so so good with the baby. She was loving all the attention, especially all the ladies who work the buffet breakfast shift! There is a supermarket across the main road where we bought bottled water for making bottles/sterilising but there are self dispensing drinks machines that we used to fill our own water bottles with too. There is also an on-site mini mart. I did find the toilets near the main restaurant a bit grim. Also no baby change in any of the men’s toilets- both parents should have facilities to care for their children! There is a spa onsite, and I had an excellent full body massage. Overall, we booked last-minute and had no idea what to expect, but it was a great holiday resort and we thoroughly enjoyed our time at Avra Beach"

"We had a wonderful stay at this seaside hotel. The room was clean and comfortable, the staff were friendly and helpful, and the location just a short walk from the beach was perfect. The food was delicious, and the overall atmosphere was relaxing. We would definitely recommend this hotel and would love to come back."

"Recently arrived back from an amazing 10 day holiday at Avra Beach. From reading reviews, we knew that we may end up with one of the rooms that are not yet refurbished and we went with the mentality that as long as it was clean, we’d be fine. However, when we are arrived and were in fact allocated one of the older rooms, I have to admit, it did feel a little disappointing and gloomy. The main issue we had though, was that the set up of the room made it unbearable through the night. The children’s beds were on a slightly lower level with an old air conditioning unit directly above one of the beds. The main room, which was partitioned off and up a couple of steps, didn’t have its own air conditioner, which meant it was difficult to manage through the night. When we left it on, it was loud and the children were freezing in their room, but if we turned it off, the double room became unbearably hot. We contacted reception about the issue the next morning and were moved to one of the new rooms which was absolutely perfect and what I consider to be the best location in the hotel (ground floor, garden view. We were room 019) However, I know we were very lucky to have that option available to us right away and that it was likely because we arrived mid to end of June, rather than a week or so later when it began to get busy. We enjoyed the food in the food hall every night and found there was always plenty for us to choose from. We only ate there for dinner as my kids slept past breakfast every day (which is unheard of, so we weren’t waking them) and we preferred the Greek/Italian restaurant for lunch. You can dine inside there or take your food out to enjoy at your lounger or at the outdoor tables which is great. The poolside snack bar also has pastries, cakes, rolls etc available all day which are nice enough. The all inclusive cocktails were fine in my opinion. Not the best I’ve had but I still enjoyed them - my particular favourite, the Avra beach special. There definitely aren’t enough sun loungers by the pool, but we usually arrived there around 10am and found that there was always space to take some of the stacked ones and find a spot for them. Again, this could be due to us being early in the summer as it was getting busier as we were leaving. I personally think that the amount of tables by the pool is unnecessary and it would be better if some of them were replaced with loungers. The views are beautiful, sunset unreal and location excellent. But of course as most reviews state, the stand out of the holiday is the animation team! Though it is obviously their job to make you feel welcome and be friendly, they really go the extra mile, remembering names, where guests are from and when they’re leaving etc. They make you feel more like a friend than just another face which is nice. Special shout out to Sam, Boogie and Tibi who are always around the pool, chatting to guests and trying to get everyone involved in activities, but never being pushy or making you feel like you can’t say no, which is something I worried about when I first saw them scouting the pool. I needn’t have worried though - they have a laugh with the guests but don’t overdo it. For us though, the highlight of the holiday was absolutely Anna and Erina who look after the children in the kids club and do the mini disco at night. Our two girls (10 and 6) can be shy and prefer to enjoy entertainment from the table rather than join in up front. But they totally fell in love with Anna and Erina after having so much fun with them at the kids club, and by our last night the girls had them up dancing and singing with everyone. We couldn’t believe it. It was amazing to see and really made our holiday. There were a few days our kids spent around 3 hours at the kids club, just because they loved doing activities with the girls and for the first time ever, we felt completely at ease leaving them there to go and enjoy some cocktails by the pool. They were so sad to leave them and were glad when we got to see them right before we left for an extra goodbye."