Aloe Hotel Review

Overall Rating

Excellent location Friendly bar staff Exchangable half board

Nowhere near 4* standard Some rude, surly and arrogant staff Shabby decor Total rip-off

Just returned from one week at Hotel Aloe in Paphos, from 3-10 July. What can I say? Firstly the good points - the reception at first appears to be immaculate (this is until you see how worn the decor is). The staff (mostly Hungarian it seems) in the hotel bar were very friendly, chatty and eager to help. Tatiana, the customer relations lady was very helpful in explaining some of the hotel's bizarre policies, and made a point of checking up on us each day. The cleaning staff were very efficient, immaculate almost to the point of ridicule (screwing our tooth paste caps back on the wrong tubes!!) HOWEVER, a Four Star Hotel experience this does not make. On arrival, we were met by rude and unhelpful reception staff, who remained so for the duration of our stay. This made the daily charge of C£1.50 for keeping ones own drinks in the room's (lukewarm) minibar even harder to swallow. In a desperate attempt to cling onto its fourth star (which it will no doubt lose very soon), despite the weak air conditioning in the hotel it has introduced a questionable rule whereby guests cannot wear shorts to dinner - yet the management are incapable of enforcing other rules regarding the reservation of sun beds and diving in the freeform pool (which at its deepest point is less than 2m deep). Despite the excellent local cuisine available at breakfast, obviously Brits abroad expect a cooked breakfast. I stuck to haloumi and croissants, however, the scrambled egg would flood your plate with water and the bacon appeared to be fashioned from MDF. My father requested a fried egg on a Tuesday and witnessed an irate chef explaining, correction, lambasting the Customer Relations officer. Apparently one can only get fried eggs every other day, and that was that. Unless you pay for room service, where they are available every day. Interesting, that. In a four star hotel, below average chefs acting like Gordon Ramsay when they can barely scrape scrambled egg together just is not acceptable. The daily charge for half board is £12, yet should you choose to use your second meal at the pool bar instead of at the evening buffet, you receive a £4 allowance. The food is served to you by grumpy staff, which promptly walks off when you attempt to request further service. For a four star hotel , the rooms are tatty and basic, with very grubby plastic furniture on the balcony, TVs which routinely shut off the signal mid-programme and basic bathrooms with narrow, worn baths. The air conditioning was noisy and inefficient. Hotel entertainment added up to Karaoke and thrice-weekly visits from "Cats Eye", a local cabaret act - you know the score. Two average musicians playing to a backing tape. Poor. Once a week dinner is replaced by a flamb night - f/b and h/b guests have the choice of paying for a dinner they've already paid for (but with a £4 discount), or going out for food to one of the resorts' many fine restaurants. It has a well-equipped gym with a woefully inadequate retrofitted air conditioning unit. My band use one of these units to cool a practice studio which is only 4 square metres in size - and it just about does the job. The gym was 2 - 3 times that size. Had this hotel been 3* the only complaints would have been the way in which it attempts to fleece its customers, however advertising a 4* hotel with the attendant prices, this hotel is a total rip off and I would suggest you avoid it altogether.