아리아드네 비치 아지오스 니콜라오스

This hotel is well situated for a ten minute walk into Agios Nikaloas yet quieter than the town. The hotel architecture is lovely as the bungalows are built into the landscape. Our rooms had a side sea view which afforded a good view of the sea and mountains. The staff were friendly and helpful. Spyrios in the restaurant gets a particular mention! The bungalows are good sized. The twin beds don’t make for much of a romantic sleep but we’re comfy. Be prepared for lots of steps! We had a few maintenance issues which could have been avoided by regular checks. The entertainment was very limited and the a la carte meal only had a set menu available for all inclusive; not the full menu. It would have been good to have a toilet near the pools as you had to return to your room otherwise. All in all, a lovely hotel with charm and (in most areas) great customer service. The bar staff were slow and disinterested.

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