conflicting feelings

Written: 24 february 2016
Travel time: 7 — 27 september 2015
Who does the author recommend the hotel to?: For a relaxing holiday; For families with children
Your rating of this hotel:
7.0
from 10
Hotel ratings by criteria:
Rooms: 6.0
Service: 6.0
Cleanliness: 6.0
Food: 8.0
Amenities: 7.0
Rest time - September 2015, operator "Mouzenidis Travel", tourists - two adults and a child 2.5 years old.

For the first time I do not know what kind of review to write - positive or negative.
I have never seen such a beautiful sea and such an amazing huge hotel area anywhere else. Such annoying minuses in the maintenance and equipment of a 5 * hotel - too.

Porto Carras Sitonia is one of two hotels in the larger Porto Carras Grand Resort. The complex covers an area of ​ ​.1700 hectares. On its territory there are golf fields, a farm, an organic winery, a forest, mountains and 9 km of beaches. The neighboring hotel of the Porto Carras Meliton complex is located on the shore of the marina, is considered more expensive and does not work on an all-inclusive basis.
During our stay, the guests of the hotel were mainly Serbs, Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians, Romanians and Ukrainians.


The rooms are large, bright and comfortable. Each room has a medium sized terrace without a canopy, with a table and chairs.
Standard rooms have one or two beds and a sofa, bathrooms have bathtubs and a bidet. The refrigerator works well, the TV is modern, the air conditioner is powerful and silent. Furniture and renovations are quite old, this also applies to the common areas of the hotel. Towels and linens are changed regularly and washed well. Linen is sometimes given normal, and sometimes crisp polyester. There is no kettle or cups in the room. Once during the stay (regardless of the duration) two blocks of drinking water in bottles of 1.5 liters are placed in the room.

In good weather, we had no complaints about the room, but when it started to rain heavily, a decent part of the floor (carpet) was flooded through the balcony and it began to drip from the ceiling. Why - we did not understand, since the room was on the 3rd floor, there were several more floors above. Fortunately, it was the last night before leaving. If you check out before breakfast, you can order a lunch box for the trip.

Housekeeping is terrible, as it was written in all the reviews we read.
The cleaners are just sabotaging their jobs. They don't pay attention to the "do not disturb" signs or the "no" answer from the room. They can stand at the number and ask again five times, then still come in and say that they will clean it right now, because it is so convenient for them. I asked if they heard me and if they saw the sign. In response, the cleaning lady with a smirk removed the sign from the door and threw it into her cart. I have never seen this sign again. Several times we said that if you can only clean now, then don't, just change the towels and throw out the garbage. Oh, they liked it, and the strategy changed. Now they guarded not far from the room, and as soon as we returned to it from the beach or from the restaurant, they began to bang on the door in the hope that we would refuse cleaning.

I must say that it would not be difficult for us to leave the room and let them clean it, if not for two “buts”: at that time we had a two-year-old child going to bed or already sleeping. The second "but" is you are here for my convenience, and not vice versa. And they didn't forget to take tips. Complaining about reception didn't help.

Dining room. This is not a restaurant by any means! A huge room, which should accommodate 1000 hotel guests at the same time. One day they really came all at the same time due to bad weather. Didn't fit, there was a queue to get in. The dining room is very noisy, drinks are self-service. There are no complaints about the kitchen - the choice is large, the quality of cooking is excellent. In addition to the variety of dishes for adults, there was always something to feed a small child - soups, vegetables, fish, pasta and low-fat stews. For children, there is also a small restaurant near the main entrance to the adult. It's quiet, deserted and cool.
There are several dishes and water, a waitress is on duty. My daughter refused to eat at first in the noise and roar of the main restaurant, we took food and came to a small one. The large restaurant had themed nights, where they cooked Peking duck, Asian dishes, fish and octopuses. About nap
litkah - no juices, only instant "yuppies", wines "from a can" for an amateur, in the machine - cola, sprite and ordinary soda. There are coolers and machines for making tea and coffee.
In bars with drinks a little better, especially after the second or third week of stay. They finally start to recognize you, and then it turns out that decent brandy is included in the “all”, and soda can be obtained already chilled from the machine, and not from a bottle into a full glass of ice.

For the duration of your stay, the hotel offers free admission once to all a la carte restaurants - Greek, Italian and Asian. It was incomparable in the Asian restaurant "White room"!

The cuisine and service is beyond praise. We really enjoyed it and recommend it to everyone! The Italian had excellent main dishes and wine, but the desserts let us down: although they were called tiramisu and panna cotta, in fact they turned out to be pieces of ordinary cream cakes on biscuit. In the Greek restaurant, the cuisine was a little more varied than the everyday in the main restaurant, but the atmosphere is very pleasant, the wine is good and the advice for choosing it too. Thanks to the smiling and friendly Margarita!

Also, the hotel practices a divorce (you can’t call it differently), which is called a “theme evening” not in the main restaurant. On certain days, for example, on the "fish" day, tables are set in restaurants on the street, where you can get by appointment. Tablecloths, candles - everything that is not in the main.
Satisfied people take their places, and here the most interesting thing begins - the food is also on the Swedish line, only in a stripped down version, not even half of what is served in the main restaurant. But there is a queue for 30-40 minutes to get to these dishes with a plate. If you don’t want to pile hot, dessert and salad on the table at once, you will have to stand in line three times. At the same time, “Lyusya, I occupied you” cannot be etched out of a Slavic person by anything. The conclusion is that everything is done to unload the main restaurant, and not to prepare special dishes for everyone on special days. We ran back to the main restaurant from the "fish" evening when we found a kilometer long line for food, and were pleasantly surprised by the octopus, shrimp and salted salmon in the main restaurant.
Both in a la carte restaurants and theme nights, you need to sign up in advance with the staff of the guest relay, and you don’t need to delay it - there is an appointment only at a certain time, you may not have time.

Beach. The sea is the cleanest, I have not seen anywhere better. On the shore is not sand, but a small pebble with shells. Clean normally, sun loungers and umbrellas enough. There are no mattresses for sunbeds, umbrellas are small round. Just one toilet and shower on a fairly long coastline, it's not enough. The bar offers alcohol and soft drinks, white and chocolate ice cream, tea, coffee. At the very end of the beach, some kind of pipe goes out into the sea, I don’t know what it is, the water is colder there, no dirt was noticed. But swim all the same went to another place.


Please bring your own beach towels or buy locally. The hotel rooms are very dilapidated, gray and washed out.

Pools. Outdoor pools do not stand up to criticism.
I read a review from a tourist who visited there a few years ago, he complained that the tiles in the pools were old, chipped and people would get hurt. The hotel solved this problem in a very original way - the bottom and walls were covered with plastic. Such a bag. I saw this in hotels without stars in Transcarpathia, where you can’t do it any other way, but for five stars ...There are no words. How they are cleaned, I do not presume to judge, but the fact that every child who put himself in the pool, then loomed with a cough and runny nose in the queue to the doctor, did not escape our attention. Slides, by the way, are not bad there, and a small branch of the "Jacuzzi" not far from the bar, too.
The hotel also has a spa with an indoor pool. Entrance only to the pool (recognized in case of bad weather) - $ 10.

Children's room. She is. There is no sense from this. Very beautiful stands with children's works and crafts, with photos and reviews.
In addition to the stands, the work of the room looks like this: the girl opens it, lets the children in with or without parents, and sits at her table. When it's time to close, he asks everyone to leave. Maybe we were so unlucky, after two times they didn’t check again. Children's animation is reduced to a children's disco, where a clown, like from a horror movie, runs around and yells, and the children have to yell at him. My daughter still thinks that the clown drags bad children to his forest, yells at them, and then eats them. She herself came up with, based on children's entertainment in Porto Carras. The playground is good and safe in both Sithonia and Meliton, where you can also go.

Adult animation does not shine either - they invite you to aerobics and volleyball, and that's it.

From the main entrance every hour a train with trailers departs, which takes those who wish for free along a certain declared route throughout the complex with stops - past the marina with yachts, past the farm, with a stop at the winery, where it stops for 20 minutes for tasting. The tasting costs 2 euros and includes 2 wines, each day it can be a different wine, depending on what is opened. We drove it to the marina almost every day to walk back and use the wifi there, since it was problematic in Porto Carras Sithonia.

A little information for those who will book rooms - Golf View is cheaper, but better than Sea View! A side sea view will work anyway, but the golf course side is much quieter. All this bacchanalia with clowns, bars, pools - it's all under the balconies of the Sea View rooms. On the opposite side - a view of the village of Neos Marmaras, the sea, golf courses, mountains.
Minus - here is the central entrance of the hotel, but there is no sound from it.

The village can be reached on foot along the road along the beach in 20-30 minutes. And you can sail on a boat from the marina in five minutes. In Neos Marmaras there are taverns, souvenir shops, on Thursdays a market with fruits, honey, olives. If you turn right halfway and walk about 15 minutes through the "gardens", you can go to the road that leads back to the hotel, in the place where the supermarket is located. It has everything you need - from food, fruits, drinks, to powders, toys, etc.

In general, the holiday was a success, and we would not refuse to come here again. A lot of negative reviews and low ratings of the hotel are caused, in my opinion, by the fact that people did not quite understand where they were going. The actual picture is this - it's a "five" at a price of 3 * + or 4 *, but miracles do not happen. We drove behind a huge green, shady area with a cool OWN beach, which is generally rare for Greece.
For normal food suitable for a child and for a clean sea. We got all this, the described minuses didn’t spoil our vacation, I wrote all this for other tourists so that they know what to be prepared for.

A small addition - we checked various options before booking, including the miscalculation of a self-guided trip. Mouzenidis got the lowest price.
Translated automatically from Russian. View original