Category: Greek Islands hotels (page 11 of 13)

A colourful Oia memory gets whitewashed

March 4, 2012 / / 0 Comments
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Armeni Village Rooms & Suites Oia Santorini

The snow-white Santorini clifftop villages of Imerovigli and Fira provide a dramatic, distant backdrop for the distinctive blue and orange colours on the exterior of the caldera-view Armeni Village Rooms & Suites …

 

Armeni Village Rooms & Suites Oia Santorini

… which we photographed during a visit to Oia in 2005  …

 

Armeni Village Rooms & Suites Oia Santorini

… but as this photo I discovered today on the Armeni Village website indicates …

 

Armeni Village Rooms & Suites Oia Santorini

… the hotel has ditched the blue and orange, and now sports a simple stark white exterior. (Photo from the Armeni Village Rooms & Suites website.)

 

Santorini whiteout: We’ve been to Santorini three different times, but I’ve always had vivid memories of a specific hotel we photographed in the incredibly picturesque and romantic village of Oia back in 2005 — memorable because of its distinctive blue and orange exterior.

After looking at the photos today, I checked out the Armeni Village website and was surprised — and, to be honest, a little dismayed — to see it doesn’t look quite the same. The blue and orange paintjob is history, and the hotel now sports a simple but sophisticated stark white exterior.

The Armeni Village certainly looks elegant, and expensive, but to me seems to have lost much of its charm and appeal by whitewashing its eye-catching colour scheme. Now, it’s just another typical white Greek luxury hotel on a spectacular cliffside location.

But at least one important thing hasn’t changed: the hotel’s incredible caldera views.

If you want to experience them for yourself, you can still reserve a double room for as little as €110 per night — provided you can travel in April or early May. If you wait until June, that same room will cost you €170. And if you can’t travel until July or August, get ready to fork out at least €230 per night. Might sound like a lot of money for a room, but then it’s in Oia … and that marvellous, timeless view is priceless.

 

 

Greece holiday 2011: Checking in at the family-run Hermes Hotel at Agios Ioannis on Ios

October 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments
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Hermes Ios Hotel

Hermes Hotel is conveniently located at Agios Ioannis on Ios, short walking distance from Chora and  gorgeous Mylopotas beach and bay

 

Comfortable and convenient: In my post on August 17 2011, I described arriving at Ios for the first time, and getting a brief glimpse of the island’s port area, Yialos. Here, I’ll pick up where I left off.

It was late afternoon and clouds were slowly starting to dissipate as a major thunderstorm system moved across the Aegean. It had been unseasonably chilly and windy when our ferry left Mykonos several hours earlier, and the highspeed catamaran was thrashed with driving rain almost the entire trip to Ios. Things looked bleak, especially when we stopped en route at Paros. Rain was pelting against the ferry windows so hard we could barely see the port village of Paroikia, but we did see incessant lightning strikes and hear thunder booming ferociously. Fortunately, by the time the Flying Cat 4 entered the harbour at at Yialos port on Ios, the storm system was clearing and the weather held better promise for our five-day stay on the island.

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The Naxos Imperial Resort’s Figure 8-shaped swimming pool

September 30, 2011 / / 1 Comment
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Naxos Imperial Resort & Spa swimming pool

This pic from the Naxos Imperial Resort & Spa website shows the Figure 8 shape of the hotel’s swimming pool above Agios Prokopios beach

 

Swim in circles: One of the big changes we noticed on Naxos during our May 2009 visit was a brand-new resort just a few steps down the road from the Lianos Village Hotel, where we have enjoyed staying on our last two Naxos holidays.

We could see that finishing touches were still being applied to the five-star Naxos Imperial Resort & Spa, which had been built during the winter of 2008-2009. But the large luxury resort (it has a main building with restaurants, bars and spa facilities, plus six separate wings with single, double, triple and quadruple hotel rooms) didn’t appear to have any guests at the time. At least, there were none that we could see.

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Cool pools: Splash and dive through the ancient Portara monument at the Naxos Beach II Hotel

September 1, 2011 / / 0 Comments
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Naxos Beach II hotel swimming pool

The bottom of the oval swimming pool at the Naxos Beach II Hotel is decorated with a large illustration of the Portara, the island’s most famous monument

 

Good swims: Our all-time favourite swimming pool in the Greek Islands is the only one in which we actually got to  spend quite a bit of time splashing around without feeling like we were going to freeze. As I’ve mentioned before, we usually find the water in hotel swimming pools too chilly for swimming when we travel to Greece in the spring. We’ve found some pools to be too cold to our liking even in late September, too! But we didn’t have any complaints about water temperature in 2005 when we stayed at the Naxos Beach II Hotel during our first visit to Naxos.

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Our windowless cave-style Santorini hotel room with its low ‘hobbit’ door

August 28, 2011 / / 0 Comments
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Cliffside Suites Santorini Room 119

Room 119 at Grotto Villas/Cliff Side Suites in Firostefani had no window …

 

Grotto Villas Cliffside Suites Suite 119

… and the door was only 5 feet 5 inches tall. Don’t forget to duck!

 

Head knocker: Santorini is world-renowned for spectacular scenery, and its magnificent caldera views drew us back to the island three consecutive years in a row. We just couldn’t get enough of the breathtaking landscape, colourful clifftop villages and endless views of the gorgeous blue Aegean Sea. So imagine our reaction when we arrived at the Grotto Villas/Cliff Side Suites hotel in Firostefani to discover that our assigned room — #119 — didn’t even have a window!

That happened back in 2006, but I still remember our surprise and disappointment like it were yesterday. It would be bad enough to be assigned a windowless hotel room anywhere when you’re travelling on vacation. But on Santorini of all islands? There ought to be a law against it! To add insult to injury, the room door had a low frame, and I kept banging the top of my head on it whenever I went in and out. I’m only 5’7, and until I arrived at Grotto Villas/Cliff Side Suites I never expected that I would ever be too tall to walk into a hotel room while standing upright!

 

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Sea, sun, sand, drinks & dining at Platis Gialos, the popular Mykonos “family” beach

August 23, 2011 / / 2 Comments
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Platis Gialos beach Mykonos

A hotel and resort area just a 15-minute bus ride from Mykonos Town, Platis Gialos is one of the most popular beaches on Mykonos island …

 

Platis Gialos beach Mykonos

… with hundreds of rental sunbeds and a good selection of bars and tavernas at the front of hotels stretching along the sandy beach

 

Family friendly: If you want to spend time with your kids on a beautiful Mykonos beach that has  a good selection of restaurants, bars and water sports facilities, but none of the raucous and raunchy partying that some of the island’s beaches are famous for, then you’ve got two excellent choices on the island’s south coast.

You could visit Ornos beach, which I profiled in my July 24 2011 post, or you could go to Platis Gialos beach. They’re not the only family-friendly beaches on Mykonos, of course, but they are two of the easiest to reach from Mykonos Town — especially if you don’t plan to rent a vehicle during your island visit and will be relying solely on buses or taxis to get around.

 

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Quirks & curiosities: Castle-sized room key in Naxos

August 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments
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Naxos Beach II hotel room key

Our biggest hotel room key — ever — had to be the one that opened our studio at the Naxos Beach II hotel on a hillside in the Stelida district of Naxos.

 

Naxos Beach II hotel room key

The key was’t just big, but it was heavy, too. It nearly poked a hole in my shorts pocket, so we turned it in to reception every time we left the hotel.

 

Naxos Beach II hotel room key

 Here I am wielding the big key after opening our studio’s split door

 

 

Cool pools: The curvaceous chilly swimming pool at the Rodos Palladium on Kallithea beach, Rhodes

August 2, 2011 / / 0 Comments
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Rodos Palladium swimming pool

A late afternoon view of the huge free-form swimming pool at the Rodos Palladium. The pool is just steps from Kallithea beach, 8 km from Rhodes Town.

 

Hot and cold: The biggest hotel swimming pool we’ve seen in the Greek Islands — so far — was the large free-form pool at the five-star Rodos Palladium hotel, just a stone’s throw from Kallithea beach on Rhodes.

We stayed at the Rodos Palladium on an island-hopping package tour during our first-ever trip to Greece back in 2004. The swimming pool and its spacious deck looked quite impressive from our hotel room balcony, and reminded us of some of the huge free-form pools we’ve enjoyed at resorts in the Caribbean and Central America. The big difference was the water temperature. Whereas we spent hours in the pool on our holidays to the southern destinations, we couldn’t even get in the pool at the Rodos Palladium because the water was so incredibly cold! Even after laying in the sun for a couple of hours, the water was too cold to bear. We weren’t the only ones who couldn’t get in — very few other guests could tolerate the cold temperature, either. Only a couple of people braved the chilly water, and didn’t stay in it for long.

The hotel also has an indoor heated pool, but the water temperature there was at the other extreme — way too hot! It felt like swimming in a giant hot tub, and the hot water wasn’t the least bit refreshing.  We didn’t get any photos of the indoor pool — the pool room was so steamy, it fogged up my camera lens — but we did take several pics of the outdoor pool, which appear below:

 

Rodos Palladium Hotel swimming pool

Looking across part of the outdoor swimming pool toward two of the Rodos Palladium hotel buildings … 

 

Rodos Palladium hotel swimming pool

… and looking to the right, from the same position, at another hotel wing

 

Rodos Palladium hotel swimming pool

Our hotel room balcony view of the Rodos Palladium swimming pool. Note the rows of dozens of lounge chairs and umbrellas at the far end of the pool. 

 

Rodos Palladium hotel swimming pool bar

The circular bar in the middle of the Rodos Palladium pool

 

Rodos Palladium hotel swimming pool at dusk

A view of the Rodos Palladium swimming pool and beach at dusk

 

Rodos Palladium swimming pool

An afternoon view of the pool. Three people are visible in the pool, probably the most we saw in the bone-chilling-cold water at any one time — even though the air temperature was rather toasty, hitting the high 20s Celsius.

 

 

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