Blue Lagoon Village

We stayed at Blue Lagoon Village as a family of four - my partner, our young daughter and our baby son. I want to be fair and factual about our holiday, because there is a lot the resort gets right and some things it gets badly wrong. On the strength of its facilities I would describe it as a low-tier four star resort, not the five star experience some may expect, but my overall rating is one star and that is entirely down to how food allergies were handled. First, the genuine positives. The bar staff, waiting staff and cleaning staff were all amazing - consistently friendly, hard working and attentive, and they were the highlight of the trip. The pools are great and well maintained. Car hire on site is very convenient and worked well for us. The TUI Kids Club and TUI Baby Club were both excellent, we used them for our daughter and our son and they genuinely loved every visit, which made a real difference to our week. A few practical points for other families. The site is incredibly hilly. Travelling with a young child and a buggy, getting around is a real struggle. Reception provides a map, but buggy friendly routes are not marked on it. Outlining those routes would be a simple, low cost change that would improve the experience enormously for families with pushchairs or anyone with limited mobility. The beach is worth knowing about too, it is very fine pebbles and silt, which makes it slippery to enter the sea unless you use the jetty. I would strongly recommend bringing beach shoes. The food was disappointing. At best it is three star. The buffet is repetitive across the week and there are no food stations where dishes are made to order. The Chinese restaurant was the highlight. It is worth noting that a lot of the food is overly salty. I am well travelled and have stayed in many four and five star hotels and this fell clearly below that standard. My most serious concern, and the reason for the rating, is the handling of food allergies. I would strongly advise anyone with food allergies against staying here. Our daughter has anaphylactic food allergies, so this matters to us enormously. Many dishes did not carry allergen labels and because her allergy is so severe, I avoid peanut entirely, yet I took a bite of a pudding that clearly tasted of peanut. When I raised it with the sous chef, the response was appalling. I was told I should be able to identify what a crushed peanut looks like, so the lack of allergen label did not matter. When I explained that reception had told me at check in to speak to guest services about allergies, which I had done, I was told that "guest services know nothing." The point I was making was simple - I could just as easily have been the person with the allergy and it was completely disregarded. The sous chef was rude and dismissive and, in my view, should not be in a guest facing role. The following morning the same problem recurred! My partner drank a smoothie made with peanut butter that carried no label. Thankfully neither of these items reached our daughter, or she would have suffered an anaphylactic reaction. After I had raised the issue with guest services three separate times, random "contains peanut" labels began appearing on dishes, which only increased my concern, because the main allergen cards for those same dishes did not show the peanut symbol, so the labelling was inconsistent and unreliable. I have never experienced this kind of mistreatment of allergies at any other hotel, and on that basis alone I would not book here again. The staff, the kids' clubs and the facilities deserve real credit, but a resort that handles severe allergies this carelessly cannot be recommended to families who depend on getting it right.

All round we had a lovely week at Blue Lagoon with lots of positives to mention. However there are unfortunately some negatives too, but nothing which can't be easily addressed.

The positives:

Splash Park - Blue Lagoon has the best in-hotel offering we’ve experienced. Our kids (3 and 6) both loved it, so much so that we spent at least half of each day watching them lap the slides before moving to one of the main pools. It literally has something for all ages!

Restaurants - the setting for the main restaurant is absolutely stunning and the food is delicious, of good quality and varied. There is definitely something for all tastes / dietary requirements. The bookable restaurants are also very good, and had good availability for peak season (a nice surprise given the arduous / disappointing booking experiences we've had at other hotels). We particularly enjoyed the BBQ restaurant where you grill your own dinner!

Grounds / Landscaping - the sprawling ‘village’ that is Blue Lagoon is beautifully landscaped and nestles seamlessly into THE most idyllic spot. I genuinely don’t think the official resort photography does it justice! We never actually saw anyone in action on the gardening front but they must put hundreds of man hours into keeping it all looking fantastic (presumably before us tourists get out of bed).

Sunbeds: plentiful and, for a resort of this size, we were surprised that not once did we struggle to find a space (which is impressive given we're a family of 4 and with young children were often 'late to the party').

Rooms: we had family double with sea view. The view was absolutely stunning, the bedrooms were very generous (size wise), beds were comfy and we didn't have any sort of noise issues. Our only criticism would be that the decor is incredibly basic and bland, and that's probably a point which could be applied to the resort more generally tbh.

The negatives:

Sustainability: the amount of single use plastic flowing through this resort is disgraceful. We probably went through more in a week (just through our basic need to drink water) than we have done over the past year (across all aspects of our lives)! The only place to get water is at one of the bars / snack stations where you're typically needing to take several tiny (500 ml) bottles. This means you have to take at least 3-4 bottles per person per day! Would it really be that difficult for them to bulk buy large (reusable) industrial / water-cooler tanks and then link them to water refill stations (so people can use their own reusable bottles). Something else to mention is that their housekeeping team didn't seem to change all towels every day (regardless of whether they could be reused). Surely a ‘hang to reuse’ policy could be started to avoid unnecessary laundry? Finally, we found it comical that their ‘environmental policy’ (proudly hung in the reception lobby) majors on their switch to reusable straws. A laughable claim given we didn’t see a single reusable straw during our entire stay. Perhaps you have to specifically ask for them when ordering but that wasn't made clear to us. Just place them front and centre of the bar so that it’s the easy / preferred option!

Gym: for a hotel of this size we cannot quite believe how small / poorly equipped the gym was! What you see in the listing photo is literally it, nothing more! There wasn’t even a full set of free weights, nor a single (basic) gym bench…….we'd have expected to see multiples of both (to cater for peak periods). All they had was a very random range of exercise machines and just two roll matts. The randomness of their machines was quite comical, for example they have two machines for hamstring / glute exercises but no counter machine for quad exercises. We also thought their opening hours were insufficient, 7:30am really isn’t early enough given that most gym users on holidays typically want to get their workout done first thing so they can then enjoy the rest of their day in the sunshine. This 'norm' was very obvious as there were at least 15 people waiting around to go in on both occasions I went (7:30am on the dot).

Staff: all incredibly polite and helpful but we did not like that so many members of staff were clearly not of Greek origin. You come to expect a bit of that across ‘back of house’ functions (as unfortunately that has become the norm in most hotels these days) but at Blue Lagoon it felt like 80-90% of all staff (including ‘front of house’ functions) were not Greek. For us this reduced the authentic look / feel of the resort and perhaps reveals the true corporate ethics / drivers of the parent company (import cheaper labour and increase the margins). I can't believe for a minute they would struggle to find Greeks willing to take those roles.

Size: it really is a village!! expect to walk 14,000+ steps a day just to use all their facilities. To be fair they do have a decent golf buggy service which we used a number of times and I have to say it was pretty consistent in terms of availability (outside of check-in / check-out time). Some people will like the size of this resort (as with this comes a huge range of pools, entertainment, restaurants, etc) but for us it was a firm negative......made us realise we prefer a more intimate vibe.

Decor: whilst the architect is very attractive (sleak / modern vibes) they could definitely do with spicing up the decor a little bit. Everything just felt a little too homogenous and bland. It wouldn't be too difficult for them to install some colour pop here and there, like the sunbed umbrellas and / or across their art work.