Very very poor

Terrible entertainment but apart from that a great holiday

Brilliant family run hotel with friendly staff who will always try and help. Hotel manager is a absolute star, nothing is too much trouble.

Disappointing – not what I would call fully all-inclusive We stayed at Rodos Star Hotel in Afantou as a family with four children and unfortunately the experience fell well short of what we expected from an all-inclusive family holiday. Firstly, I wouldn’t describe the hotel as fully all-inclusive. Even basic bottled water costs €1 at the hotel, which is particularly frustrating when you can go into Afantou town and buy six bottles for around €1.80. Fair enough, water is available on tap from the bar, but in the Greek heat I find it surprising that an all-inclusive hotel doesn’t even provide courtesy bottles of water in the rooms. When you’ve already paid for an all-inclusive holiday, continually having to buy something as basic as bottled water just doesn’t sit right. Our holiday also got off to a very poor start. We arrived at around 1am with four children, only to be told we were getting “special treatment”. In reality, there was no room available for us at the hotel. We were all packed into a small van and driven around 10 minutes away to a villa for the night. The villa itself was beautiful, but that wasn’t really the point. We’d travelled all day, it was the middle of the night, we had four tired children with us and there was no food or anything available when we got there. Our rooms at Rodos Star had been booked through TUI a year in advance, so arriving to find there wasn’t actually accommodation available for us was extremely disappointing. We asked to be returned to Rodos Star the following morning. For a hotel marketed towards families, there really isn’t enough for children to do. This has genuinely been the most I have ever spent during an all-inclusive holiday simply trying to keep my children occupied. Getting out isn’t particularly cheap either, with taxis being expensive, so the additional costs quickly mount up. One of the main reasons we choose all-inclusive holidays is knowing that most of the holiday is already paid for, but that certainly wasn’t how this one felt. The timings didn’t help families either. Evening meals didn’t start until 7:30pm, which felt quite late when travelling with children. This might not have been such an issue if there had been a decent selection of food available between meals, but we found the snack offering extremely poor. At times it seemed to amount to little more than things such as toasties, and the children ended up hungry while waiting for the evening meal. The evening entertainment was another strange choice for a family hotel. Shows didn’t start until around 10pm, by which point our younger children were tired. Yet the all-inclusive drinks stopped at 11pm, meaning the entertainment had barely got going before the inclusive drinks finished. Anything after that had to be paid for. Earlier family entertainment would have made far more sense, particularly during the school holidays. The food at the main meals was generally edible, but definitely not the best all-inclusive food we have experienced. On occasions we also came across meat that appeared raw or undercooked, which understandably made us cautious about what we ate. The coffee facilities were disappointing too. The coffee machine was very basic, with no cappuccino or similar choices, which was surprising for an all-inclusive hotel. There wasn’t even a kettle in our room, so you couldn’t make yourself a hot drink there either. There were, however, members of staff who absolutely deserve recognition. The cleaners worked incredibly hard throughout our stay, as did the gentleman who was out cleaning and maintaining the pool every morning. Their hard work was noticeable and appreciated. Michelle at the pool bar was brilliant. She worked extremely hard, was lovely with us and deserves particular recognition. However, she also appeared to be seriously overworked and left to manage far too much without enough help. On occasions another member of staff came to assist, but from what we personally observed, she spent a lot of the time sitting and vaping rather than actually helping. It was frustrating watching Michelle work constantly while seemingly receiving very little support. There are some genuinely lovely, hardworking members of staff at Rodos Star, and I don’t want the negatives of our stay to take anything away from them. Unfortunately, the hotel itself just didn’t deliver the family all-inclusive experience we expected, particularly considering what we paid. Between paying for bottled water, spending money simply to keep the children entertained, expensive transport, poor snacks and other extras, we spent far more money than we ever normally would on an all-inclusive holiday. For us, Rodos Star needs to offer much more for children, rethink its meal and entertainment timings, improve the food and snack options and provide more of the basics within the all-inclusive package before I could recommend it as a genuine family all-inclusive experience.

Was even than how the hotel is described on the TUI website, really felt like we got a bargain especially for the time of year we went. From the room to the food plus the entertainment it was all better than we expected really happy I booked to go there.