Olu Deniz, Hotel Karbel Review

Overall Rating

Beautiful grounds and adequate rooms

Expensive and poor quality food & drink. Room card is given to you rather than using cash (or at least being given the option)...and many more bad points below.

Stayed at the Karbel (Aug 2005) never to return. Couldn't stand the resort or the hotel. Wouldn't recommend to anyone! Feel ashamed to be British!!! The whole holiday was just a great big let down. Came home feeling just as stressed as we did before. To be honest during our stay we only had to look around the pool at the other people staying at the hotel to see why all the reviews are 10 out of 10... in my opinion the people staying at the hotel during our stay has no class, no taste, just beer swilling, loud, brash people who think that eating chips beans and nuggets every night of their life is a healthy balanced diet!

I have been to Turkey twice before, never in my life would I bother to return after this disaster! Both myself and my partner have spoken to our travel advisor who has informed us that they will no longer be featuring the Karbel after 2006 if the complaints keep coming in!

You save up and look forward to your annual 2 week holiday and to have such a bad time is heartbreaking. Bad food, awful people & a boring resort full of tacky bars. My only good point is that the Karbel has beautiful grounds and the rooms are adequate, but that is not enough to make me return (especially for the amount of money we paid for our stay)
Each to their own, but my advice would be to look else were for your hard earned holiday. Don't take the risk.

Members' Comments onMr Shaw's Review

• jennyhill on 22nd Dec 2005

  I also stayed at the karbel hotel in the last week of august 05 and as far as i am concerned your review is the biggest load of rubbish i have ever had the misfourtune of reading. Me and my husband also planned our wedding at the blue lagoon and were married whilst over there. It was the best day we could have wished for. We are not a family of lager swigging louts and also had our 3 year old son with us and 60 friends(of whom 15 stayed at our hotel) and relatives to share with us on our special day. Out of all these people not one person had a bad word to say. All i can say to you is you are obviously stuck up and you should be far pickier about where you stay in the future as i am sure people would have complaints if they had to stay in the same hotel as you. I would highly recommend this hotel.

• clg79 on 8th May 2006

  This review seems rather exteme and should be taken with a pinch of salt especially as the author has made some sweeping statements. Anyone that can label the entire residents of a hotel as having "no class, no taste, just beer swilling, loud, brash people who think that eating chips beans and nuggets every night of their life is a healthy balanced diet " cannot be taken very seriously. It is a 3* hotel, what do you expect it to be like, the Burj Al Arab? It may not be the fanciest hotel out there but it is clean, well-run and very friendly and when I stayed there I had absolutely no cause to complain about anything. Oh, and it wasn't expensive either.

• Chilli Cat on 9th May 2006

  What an awful thing to say! This user (like me) had a bad experience at this hotel - why do people get shot down in flames for sharing in their opinions just because they don't conform to the majority!! I think you people need to grow up - this man has an opinion and has felt so strongly about it that he had to share it. Ok maybe his words are a bit choice but I can tell you now that reading that review those words are very fitting to the experience I had, so he isn't that off the mark. He does mention some good points but you people seem to have looked over that part! I personally wish I had read more of these kind of reviews before ruining my 2 week holiday and spending over £1000 just for the hotel room!

• clg79 on 11th May 2006

  I repeat myself, it is a 3* hotel- you are not going to get perfection. And yes, I agree he is entitled to his opinion, as am I and while he has said some positive things I maintain that his comments about the people at the hotel are too general- there is no way that every hotel guest that week was embarrassment to the British public. Olu Deniz is a tourist resort in a popular country with a hot climate and a lot of package holidays- it seems fairly obvious to me that you are running the risk of getting a variety of holiday makers- some of whom are not going to be to your taste. It is a risk you take.

• Chilli Cat on 11th May 2006

  I understand what your saying, 3* hotel package holidays etc... but I have been to many 3* star hotels and stayed in resorts that do holiday packages and not had that much of a bad time! Whilst we were staying at this resort we spoke to other people in the hotel who had been to the resort for years and it was the general consensus that this was the first year they had seen such a dramatic change to the kind of people Olu Deniz was attracting - they mentioned that it was a shame to see there favourite holiday retreat turned into its own mini version of Blackpool. We were even warned about the prices being all in English currency on the menus/shop boards, they told us that the locals were pricing meal for example: £15 for 2 courses but because the conversion is a bit strange with the millions of Turkish lira when you paid you bill you thought you were paying £15 but the Turkish value on the bill amounted to more... people don't stop to work it out for themselves. They get away with it by saying that their establishment has there own currency rate and it is legal to do so. This is something that they hadn't seen on previous years! That to me summed up our holiday - Ripped Off!