Ariadne Beach - Adults Only in Agios Nikolaos

All Inclusive trip, unfortunately with many disappointments. Drinks are served only until 22:45, even though the offer said until 23:00. Check-in is not possible before 12:00, and the All Inclusive wristbands are also given only after 12:00 – before that you can’t even get a glass of water. Bartenders make very weak drinks – everything tastes the same, and the alcohol selection is very limited. Even the cheapest Red Label is available only for the Ultra All Inclusive option. The hotel is mainly for people 60+, everything dies after 9 PM. No music by the pools, no animation team, and the restaurant staff speaks very poor English. The gym is a joke – just a few old machines, looks like from a storage room. After 6 PM the service gets much worse – waiters mix up orders, and the waiting time for drinks is very long. Towels were not changed daily, beach towels neither. Water in the room was only on arrival – later you have to buy it in the shop. You can’t refill bottles between meals or take water to the room. There are few parking spaces, the ping-pong table is broken, and the dart board looks 20 years old with only one dart. No snacks between meals – if you get hungry, there’s only warm water from the bar. To sum up: the food is really good, and the à la carte restaurant (included in the price) was a nice surprise. Other than that, the hotel is a quiet place for seniors, not for younger people or families looking for some fun. A good place for silence and naps – not really for a lively holiday.

We stayed for a week in early September, choosing the hotel some months ago based on previous good reviews and being happy to pay a bit extra for a solid 4* experience. That was a mistake. It is at best worthy of a middling 3* rating and in no way worth the premium it charges. That's a view reached after stays at over a dozen hotels of variable quality across Greece, so understanding and accepting that things can be hit and miss. In all that time, we've never had a "miss" between the expectation and the reality which has been as large as this. Let's start with the positives. Staff in the hotel restaurant were very friendly, and you never had a problem getting a table even at busy times as the restaurant is well-sized to cope. Food was fine - a buffet restaurant is always going to have its limitations but no complaints there. The hotel is called the Ariadne Beach. It doesn't have a beach, even though there's a clear area on the beach with sunloungers and umbrellas opposite the hotel. It's not included in your stay. Even so, the guy who fronts up the hotel's a la carte restaurant will come round and charge you 12 Euros for your sunloungers and parasol and take your money using a card machine which comes up as the hotel restaurant. "It's a public beach", apparently. Rooms: you'd like to think that the linen at a 4-star hotel would actually fit the beds, but no. The bed sheets are too short for the mattress, so your feet end up on an uncovered mattress towards the bottom six inches of the bed. Nice. Oh, and that also means the bed sheets unravel themselves in the night so you end up trying to re-make your bed at 3am and see if the useless bed-throw can help you strike the balance between warmth and chill. Your room door doesn't close without having to slam it so hard that it awakens everyone in adjacent rooms and registers on the Richter scale in an earthquake monitoring centre nearby. Your bathroom could be a case study in ergonomics. Can you get out of the shower or bath without a) bruising your arm on the soap dispenser; b) falling over the toilet or c) managing to get one foot on the footmat before it sets off across the floor given the jaunty angle at which you've had to gingerly approach it? Good luck. Gym: another reason we chose this hotel was because it had one. It's bizarrely kept under lock and key, so your first exercise routine is a stroll to Reception to get the key. It's underground but has no aircon or fans (despite wiring in the walls to suggest there might have been a nod to some such notion) so it's swelteringly hot. No water provision, no gym towels which I don't think are unreasonable to expect at a 4-star. Pool: the sunloungers have mattress covers but they are absolutely filthy after a whole summer of sun-tan lotion. These need a decent wash every so often! Pool towels are included though. Yes, indeed. They're not long enough to cover your sunlounger and there's no way to exchange them