Naxos Resort Beach Hotel, Naxos

Review Rating: 3/5

Date of Visit: July 2019

Feeling somewhat of a Naxos expert, having visited three times in as many years, I booked 6 nights at Naxos Resort Hotel feeling confident it would prove an excellent choice. Sadly, we left feeling a touch underwhelmed, and I don’t think I’ll be staying here again.

Starting with the positives, then: the location is – in my humble opinion – as good as you can get on Naxos. Just minutes from the lovely St. George Beach, it’s also close enough to Naxos town that you can be walking along the harbour front within 10 minutes, with a huge selection of shops, bars and tavernas at your disposal. Apollo’s Gate is a further 10-minute walk.

As we arrived by ferry, the hotel provided a free shuttle bus to and from the port. A nice touch, as many hotels either don’t offer the service or else they charge extra for it.

The pool is lovely and a good size given its location. However, there aren’t nearly enough sunbeds for the number of guests the hotel can accommodate. They are also very prone to being ‘reserved’ early each morning, many of them remain vacant most of the day, despite the hotel rules forbidding this. We ended up being guilty of it ourselves, just to ensure we did have somewhere to sunbathe during the day.

Most of the staff are wonderful, especially the lady behind the bar at the pool. However, some of the breakfast staff seemed a bit sullen and tended to stand around chatting amongst themselves, ignoring the guests.

Now for the not-so-positives: the rooms (well, ours anyway) are pretty dated and quite small. Not something I’d noticed when booking. This usually wouldn’t bother us, after all, you don’t visit Greece to spend lots of time in a hotel room. But considering how upmarket the hotel styles itself, plus what you pay for the accommodation, I don’t think the rooms do it justice at all. The air-conditioning is pretty inadequate too: noisy if you have it turned up high, ineffective if you leave it on low.

Breakfast was on the mediocre side: plenty of selection, but none of it especially tasty. The fruit juice is obviously from a carton/concentrate rather than being fresh. Wifi was another issue. Very patchy connectivity throughout the day, to the point where I gave up and used 4G on my phone instead – luckily my contract data allowance covers Greece.

Lastly, prices at the pool bar are pretty steep. Obviously you’re paying for the convenience factor, but even so, it feels a bit much. Most days we ended up walking down the beach to a fairly new restaurant called Naxaki – it’s not cheap either, but the food is fantastic and it makes a pleasant change of scenery.

It may seem like a pretty negative review, but we did have a good time on Naxos – it’s pretty hard not to as it’s one of my favourite Greek islands – I just came away feeling that our choice of this hotel took a little away from the stay, rather than making it even better. I’d paid a premium price expecting it to be one of the highlights of our trip, and sadly it wasn’t to be.

I can’t recommend Naxos highly enough as a destination: I’ll certainly be back again soon, but it won’t be to Naxos Resort Hotel.