Mykonos hotels
 

We are looking at the Mykonos Grand and the Santa Marina for next May. The Santa Marina has offered us a pretty fair price, but the reviews at Tripadvisor are awful. Do any of you know the hotel first hand?

The Mykonos Grand has raised their prices substantially from last year. I found an agency, Kivotos of Aegean, on the internet. They offer a lower price. Has anyone heard of it?

I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks

topping... (we need more actual travel questions, occupying the hearts and minds of idle hands today... and this weekend, I suppose)...

Best wishes,

Rex

Hi babylene,
We stayed at the Santa Marina in July 2004. We have mixed feelings, so I'll tell you the pros and cons of our experience...
PROS:
-The hotel is quiet and beautiful. We loved the beach and seemed to have the place to ourselves.
-We walked to the little town of Ornos for dinner. The walk down the hill was lovely and quite picturesque, and the taverna we found was delicious. (We ate there 2 nights in a row!)

CONS:
To put it bluntly, the service SUCKS. We had spent almost 3 weeks before our stay in Italy and on Santorini, where we couldn't believe how NICE and friendly and accomodating everyone was. The employees at the Santa Marina were not just unfriendly or cold, but truly rude. The service for breakfast was so bad, that we refused to eat at the hotel again. The first room they gave us was a disaster and they told us they had nothing else. After the bathroom flooded when we flushed the toilet and the doorknob came off when we tried to go out onto the patio, they moved us to a bigger , nicer room with a lovely terrace and an ocean view.

weird... I posted without meaning to...

I wanted to say that the guys in charge of watersports and the housekeepers were really friendly and great.
I just have never in all my travels been to a hotel where the rest of the staff acted like the guests were their ememy. No where in Greece or Italy did we run across anything like it.

Hope this helps.

Thank you, Dina4, for your honest assessment. It does sound strange, doesn't it? Maybe the manager was horrible to his staff? I wonder if it is the same management today. It sounds that if we can somehow arrange to get a better room, we will be happy. Today I realized that I have enough points for one free night...so it would be more economical for us to stay there than the Mykonos Grand...which I think has priced itself too high this year. For the first two nights, the price is 50% higher than what it was last year and for the next two nights...it seems they are changing seasons a few days earlier, so the price is almost double. I am not really prepared to do that.

We chose it, too, because we stayed for free. And despite all the annoying aspects, we actually had a wonderful time.
Would we stay there again? Mykonos was beautiful. It was definitely worth staying at the Santa Marina the first time just to experience the island, but I don't think we would do it a second time. If we had a lot of Starwood points while traveling in Greece, we'd probably go back to the Vedema on Santorini-- which was AMAZING, and the service was unbelievably wonderful. Or we'd try their new hotel on Crete, since we've never been there.

In Santorini, we are staying at the Anastasis. We have heard wonderful things about it. In Naxos, we chose the Kavos Naxos, because the reviews on Tripadvisor were great. And..in Athens we got a good price at the Intercontinental. I hope the location isn't too inconvenient.

We wanted to do Crete,too, but it will have to wait for another time

That sounds great. Have a great trip!

Thank you!

Oh, and be sure to give us a trip report! Sounds like such a wonderful trip!