Summer Palace Hotel Review

Overall Rating

We arrived at the Summer Palace Hotel in Kardamena at about 1:30am, and we were greeted by a very unhelpful reception clerk. During check-in any questions I asked were replied to with one word answers. At the end of being checked in I asked if there was anywhere around where we could still get a drink. The guy looked at me like I'd just asked him if I could sleep with his wife, and he barked that everywhere was closed!

We were then told a porter would take our bags to our room, and out of our 2 cases and 2 bags he took the lightest case, leaving me to carry the rest up a rather steep hill. He virtually ran up this hill while I, loaded with luggage, tried to keep up with him as he kept darting off in between apartments. The complex is a big place and a bit of a labyrinth until you've had a couple of days there. He then took us into our room, showed us the balcony and muttered something about the land you could see on the horizon, and then he stood waiting for his tip. We later found out that the land was Turkey and the island of Nisyros. I thought the 2 Euros tip I gave him was a bargain for being made to run up a steep hill in the dark laden with bags!

The room was nice and clean, and it had everything you'd expect. The one complaint was that the "double" bed was 2 singles pushed together, but you seem to get that everywhere abroad. Double beds obviously don't exist in Europe outside of the UK!! The view from the room was nice, but as the hotel slopes up the edge of a small mountain and is right on the beach, the balcony was always very windy.
The room was nicely air conditioned, but the TV had no channels in English.

The next day we went down for lunch about 12 as we missed breakfast.
The restaurant was quite nice, and you could sit on a terrace with the view of the sea and the island of Nisyros in the distance. The dining staff were quite polite and offered us some wine. Upon tasting the glass of wine they brought, I wondered if someone had mixed up a carton of white wine and a carton of paint stripper!! I never plucked up the courage to try the red!
I have to say the food they served at lunch time was of an extremely poor quality. There was a lot of salad type stuff, which to be fair wasn't bad, but to accompany the salad were "hot" trays of dishes e.g. spaghetti bolognese, or some Greek stew type dish, or a selection of cold meats and cheese. Well, the "hot" dishes were lukewarm at best, and the quality of some of the ingredients was appalling. The stew thing looked like someone had opened a bunch of pedigree chum tins, and I was looking around to see if they had any dog biscuits to go with it, and the spaghetti bolognese was blatantly out of a tin, rather than having had a chef stand and make it.
The cold meat and cheese wasn't much better, and the ham and chicken etc was that kind of plastic, processed stuff you get in the Tesco's value range, and there was only ever 2 cheeses. Feta and some other Greek cheese that was a bit like Edam but greasier. Remember this is supposed to be 5 star, so where was the ham off the bone, the sliced chicken breast, the cheese board and a proper chef doing the cooking?

We then spent an afternoon by the pool, which was quite pleasant, although I later suffered an ear infection as the pools weren't overly clean and had no smell of chlorine whatsoever.

Later that evening we decided to go down for the evening meal, and to our amazement, the food that was put out was identical to that of lunch, and I mean identical. It literally was exactly the same. So we abandoned that and decided to eat out. However, the hotel is quite out of the way, so we had to order a cab to Kardemena. While we waited for that, we thought that now would be a good opportunity to sample a couple of the all inclusive drinks. There was only one bar, and you had to queue for quite some time to get served. When you finally did the staff were grumpy and treated you like you had just spat at them or something. I ordered a couple of cocktails which were served in 2 cheap glass tumblers with dry water marks all over them, and the cocktail tasted nothing like it should have from when I've had it before in both England and other countries.
I later went up and ordered the same cocktail and got something completely different to the first one, as a different barman made them. Later on in the holiday we got them again from another barman, and again they were different. It's obvious that when you ask for a cocktail, they really do just make them up as they go along depending on whose working.
The bar's terrace was nice though. Again, overlooking the views, but it is cheapened by the fact the glass topped tables are full of chips.

The next morning we attended the "American buffet" for breakfast. I've been to America 3 times, and I have never once been served up the rubbish they were offering at Summer Palace. The bacon was some tinned meat cut into rectangular strips, the eggs were only half cooked, the sausages were like hot dogs but not nice ones, and there were these potato things which actually would have been quite nice had they been hot, but as usual the whole lot was stone cold. I then had some cereal which looked a whole lot nicer than it tasted.

I'd say in general, when you first walk into the restaurant it doesn't look bad, it's only when you start eating it you find out how awful it is. Even the deserts were nasty. They all looked very attractive, but they all tasted exactly the same. After the first 2 days we did all of our eating and drinking out, away from the hotel, so we still had a good holiday, but obviously we spent far more than we'd originally planned, which kind of defeats the whole point of going all inclusive.

Oh, we did have one more evening meal at the hotel. There is an Italian restaurant which you have to book the day before. This ended up being by far the worst meal of the holiday. When I ordered a salad for a starter which came with a mayonnaise dressing, the waiter said quite abruptly "We run out of mayonnaise, for you this is no problem." I replied "Excuse me?" To which he replied rather surly and unpleasantly "we have no mayonnaise, you have salad without dressing, you eat, this is no problem, yes?" I then said "Well if you haven't got the dressing, I'll have something else" and then ordered a different salad. We then both ordered a pizza each, and the waiter then snatched up the menus and said to me almost shouting "you love mayonnaise so much!" Anyway, the salad was nothing special but the pizza was without a doubt the worst pizza I have ever had in my entire life anywhere! When it turned up it looked like something a 6 year old had made in cookery class. The cheese wasn't mozzarella. It was that greasy cheese from the main restaurant, and mine was supposed to be ham or something, and my girlfriend's was supposed to be pepperoni, but it was the same tinned meat they used for the bacon at breakfast, cut into cubes on mine and circles on hers! Our pizzas tasted exactly the same, even though they had completely different ingredients on the menu. We ate about 1/3 each before leaving. I did actually complain to the hotel manager about the waiter in the Italian restaurant. I don't know what the outcome was, but we did witness the hotel manager shouting at this waiter in Greek, and he didn't look happy!!

On the whole, the hotel was OK but the food, drink and service from the staff was awful. The staff in the main restaurant were the only ones we found to be polite.

One last thing. We went with Sunstar, and our rep was this Scottish guy. He was absolutely useless, and he was just as bad as the hotel staff.
We hired a car through him which never turned up. Fortunately I was able to get hold of the hire company's number and get a car at short notice, but it was some tin can as that's all they had left, rather than the Jeep we'd originally booked.

Also, we booked a trip to Turkey through the rep, and we had to give him all our passport details etc. When we got to the Port everyone was issued with a boarding pass containing all their details except us and the other couples that had come from our hotel. Fortunately there was a long haired guy who was absolutely brilliant, and he sorted everything out, but the rep had failed to arrange that properly as well.

We went to Nisyros and Turkey, and the guy who had sorted things out for us was the guide on both, and he was really nice, and really helpful and friendly. Quite the opposite to his colleague. On the last day I went up to the rep to check with him if our return flight time was still the same (which they say to do). Before answering me he finished reading the paragraph of his novel and then slowly lowered it and glared at me, and then told me to calm down and that I'd get home! Then continuing to read his book. Also, there was a whole other bunch of information he gave at the welcome meeting about Kos, which we found to be incorrect, but I can't be bothered to list that as I think I've written more than enough!

On the whole we had a good holiday, but we would not recommend this place.
Summer Palace is supposed to be a 5 star deluxe hotel, but I would class the accommodation as 4 star and the food, drink and service as an extremely poor 3 star!
It wasn't only us that thought it either. We met a few other couples who shared our view about how bad the food and service were, and how useless the rep was.