"Where to start.
Let’s begin with a few positives, for balance. Most (not all) of the staff are very kind and helpful. Zion, Charlie and the Entertainment Team were a delight. The main areas of the hotel are clean and tidy. There is a shop onsite which was useful. The spa was nice and the massage my wife and I received was fantastic value for money (I paid €40 for a one hour deep tissue massage and it was well worth the money). The main pool is big, and there is a shallower kids pool, although it’s very busy there as there is no shallow end in the main pool which is a constant 5ft deep in all areas.
The bad bits.
Arrival:
When checking in, you are told the times that each bar and restaurant is open. Pay attention as there is no welcome pack/guide in the rooms. It takes a few days to get the gist of where and when to eat and what's in the local area. I also did not see any information on walls to confirm these times.
Room:
We travelled as a family of four. When we arrived, we were taken to our room close to midnight to find one double and one single bed. When we raised this, a sofa bed was pulled out and made up but this collapsed three times. Our daughter was petrified to sleep on that (to the point she threw up). We asked for another bed but was told the manager had left and there was nothing they could do and to report it in the morning. After a long day of travel, this was not the response we had expected. As the one that drew the ‘short straw’, I can tell you that these sofa beds are extremely uncomfortable, uneven, have a large gap in the middle of it and too are short for an adult to sleep on - really not suitable for a 14 night stay and the massage I received during our stay was very much needed. After emailing the manager and contacting our rep, we did manage to get another pull out bed the next day which was fine.
One rough blanket is provided for the double bed but it’s not as wide as the bed itself. Put two adults in there and you cannot cover yourselves. This is a problem as the air conditioning doesn’t work properly (either ice cold or off were the only two options as the climate control function and directional flow did not work). I cannot understand why a second sheet isn’t placed between the one covering the mattress and the blanket. We managed to get an additional blanket, but the cleaners would often take these two and replace with just one.
There is a constant foul smell from the bathroom. Towels are collected each day and occasionally replaced (we had days of just one fresh towel for four of us). The safety deposit box didn’t work (we discovered another hidden in the draw on our last day which might have worked had we known it was there).
There is a fridge in the room which cannot be turned on.
The electricity in the room only comes on when your key card is placed in the slot, meaning you cannot charge devices during the day. I can understand a need to stop unnecessary use of the air conditioning, but seems silly not allowing the plugs and fridge to be turned on.
As the World Cup was on, I found myself having to watch one of the games n the room as our girls were too tired. I didn’t measure the TV but I am pretty confident it’s smaller than the laptop screen I am using right now - you cannot see it from the bed unless you are blessed with the eyes of a Sea Eagle.
Despite the above, the rooms were generally clean and enough space for the four of us.
Wifi is terrible. I had some work to do but this was impossible so I ended up heading around the corner to Sky Bar at breakfast time.
Restaurants and bars:
The main buffet restaurant is very ‘hit and miss’ (mostly ‘miss’). We had a couple of rather nice dishes over our two weeks, but for the most part, the hot options were just slop, with no labels explaining what it was. One example - there seemed to be a pasta bake - looked cheesy. Turns out, it was a bland white sauce (no cheese) and what I thought was pasta was actually chips, presumably left over from the previous service. There are flies EVERYWHERE, with absolutely no effort to remove this health risk (a few neon fly zappers near the salad bar would be a good start). It doesn’t matter whether you eat indoors or outside, a fly will land on you or your food every 5 seconds. Flies are crawling all over the sand and dips.
There is an outside grill which churned out some nice chicken and fish but this wasn’t every day. There was one day of the fourteen which had some kind of wrap, but the queue for this exciting food was crazy so we gave up.
The dessert bar was fine but mostly consisted of the same cakes, just coloured differently and soaked in syrup.
There are chips and nuggets available with every meal which is handy if you have kids that like bland food (luckily, ours are slightly more adventurous than that).
The snack bar food was pretty awful, and this is only open 14:00 - 16:00. Cold chips and foul burgers with little meat content were the main staple, as were waffles and chocolate sauce (more on that later). On one day they offered Pide, but again after queueing for 30 mins they ran out.
Ice creams are provided once a day at 15:00.
Once evening service is completed, your next option for food is soup at midnight. Then something else apparently at 02:30.
There is an a la carte restaurant behind reception and you get one visit for each week you stay (I think). The fish night was superb and perhaps the best sea bass we've ever eaten. The Italian night, however, was a disaster. When booking, I told them our children would eat from the adult menu. When we arrived, this seemed to confuse the servers. They told us kids couldn’t have the adult starters (which consisted of three mushrooms with melted cheese on top), and bruschetta. They actually cut one of the small bruschetta in half and handed it to my daughter which was hilarious and infuriating. 30 mins after our starters were finished, our tables had not been cleared. I asked for another drink (just a second one following the drinks on arrival), but this never came. When the main course finally arrived, the chicken pasta was fine (nothing special) but the pizzas (which arrived in bulk from another area of the hotel) arrived stone cold (one felt like it had been in the fridge all day). We walked out at this point, as did at least one other table.
Drinks:
The iced coffee was a big hit with our family. The alcoholic drinks, less so. The beer is drinkable, but the spirits are pointless. Either watered down or have little/no alcohol content. We were not trying to get drunk, but you could easily have 10 vodka and cokes and not feel a thing. Spirit choices are very limited. It’s just ‘vokda’, some kind of whiskey mix, or gin. There were some cocktails and mocktails but not really worth the hassle. There are often large queues at the bar and it regularly runs out of ice. Want a drink after midnight - these then become chargeable.
Pool Area:
Back to the chocolate sauce from the snack bar - this is everywhere. On every sun bed which do not look like they have been cleaned for quite some time. There are a lot of sun loungers but best to get down early as they soon run out. There are a fair number of parasols but many are broken. The music varied between Turkish and Western but this is LOUD and the manager of the Entertainment Team on the mic does become rather annoying after a while (and my wife witnessed him being rather rude to his team). We saw a couple of shows at the outside theatre and these were good. There is a disco for kids for an hour before the show which seemed to be popular. Water polo and volleyball were fun, and there are other activities such as boules, Zumba and water aerobic if you are that way inclined.
Evenings:
There is a nice terrace above the restaurant, but only 6 tables. Shame they don't make more of this huge space as there is a storage of tables in the evening.
Clientele:
From what I could gather, most guest are Turkish, and very rude. The amount of times I helped somebody, let them through or gave something to them with not so much as a smile. They’ll barge past you through doorways and will push to the front of queues regularly. As a cultural thing, it seems the thing to do is to take several plates to the buffet and to create another buffet on your table, most of which won’t be eaten. I witnessed so many tables with piles of pancakes, bread, fruit and meat and most went to waste, it was crazy, and often included items which had then run out in the restaurant. I spoke to some of the staff who were equally unimpressed by the behaviours of the Turkish guests. Let me just clarify something here though, the locals we met were extremely kind and polite so I am not bashing the Turkish here - just the guests we encountered.
Excursions
We booked the boat trip and night market via our rep, Charlie - both were really good value for money and we highly recommend you doing the same if you stay here. We also had some family photos taken by Zion the in-house photographer and they are fantastic.
Overall
Despite the obvious downfalls of the hotel, we didn’t kick up too much of a fuss. We reported most of these issues and some were resolved. The air conditioning problems were never sorted but rather than let it get us down, we just made the most of it.
Didim is a fantastic resort, and we will be back, just not at this hotel. We met some incredible people and visited some cracking bars and restaurants (which we hadn’t planned on doing but as explained earlier, the food was simply not up to scratch). Shout out to Lee at Sky Bar (a shot walk from the hotel and well worth a visit) as well as the lovely team at Pinocchios on the main strip - a must visit if you have children under 12 or want some incredible food."
