Otium Eco Club Side

We like hier isr really good and nedim fotograf do really good work and really professional animasjon team also really good and kids clip olso really good jana isr really good there really ssempatishe do really good work Seyda from guest relations very helpful! All the staff fab! Lots for kids to do! Would definitely recommend this hotel

All in all it was fine… but we wouldn’t return.

I never write TripAdvisor reviews, but after staying here I thought I’d share our experience.

We stayed as a British family with our 10 year old daughter. This was a budget friendly holiday and, in many ways, it lived up to that.

THE GOOD

• The quieter pool was the highlight. We never had to reserve sunbeds at the crack of dawn and there were still plenty available around 10am.
• The water slides were brilliant and adults could use them too.
• The hotel was very clean.
• The air conditioning worked really well.
• The staff were friendly and worked incredibly hard.
• The coffee from the café and reception bar was genuinely very good.
• The snack bar was a good option for lunch.
• There was plenty of fresh baklava every evening if you’re a fan.

THE NOT SO GOOD

• The food was by far the biggest disappointment. We’re not food snobs and genuinely enjoy trying different cuisines, but we really struggled with the quality. Dinner was repetitive, there were no themed nights, very few child friendly options and it felt like endless stews, including lamb neck, plus overcooked vegetables. Houmous appeared once, but otherwise there was very little of the Turkish food we’d hoped for, such as kebabs.
• Our daughter lived on chips and plain spaghetti at dinner and chips, pizza and burgers at lunch. Looking around the restaurant, most of the other children seemed to be eating exactly the same thing. It also seemed odd that the separate children’s restaurant served exactly the same food as the main restaurant.
• The dining room was very hot, there was no grated cheese for the pasta and no ice cream in the restaurant itself.
• We actually ate out one evening, something we’ve never done before on an all inclusive holiday, because we simply couldn’t face another dinner there.
• We’d read so many reviews praising the food before arriving, so perhaps our expectations were higher than they should have been. Unfortunately, our experience was completely different.
• By UK standards, we’d say the hotel felt much closer to a 2 or 3 star than a 5 star.
• The main pool was extremely busy and noisy.
• The entertainment was underwhelming.
• The drinks weren’t branded, including the “Coke Zero”.
• The sofa bed was like sleeping on a brick, although reception happily brought us a proper duvet when we asked. There was also just one all-purpose “mystery wash” in the shower instead of separate shampoo, conditioner and body wash.
• The beach was nice and we enjoyed hiring a cabana. We’d recommend the €40 option, but wouldn’t bother paying the extra €20 for the upgrade. The 10am beach shuttle was also incredibly busy.
• The on-site shop was exceptionally expensive. A carton of milk and a small tube of toothpaste cost us €8.

Overall

We still had a lovely holiday because we were together as a family, and we always make the best of wherever we go.

If you’ve booked this hotel at a good price and go with realistic expectations, you’ll probably have a perfectly enjoyable holiday.

For us, though, it felt as though the hotel catered much more towards the domestic Turkish market than an international one, particularly when it came to the food.

Would we return? No.

I’ve never been so excited to get home and cook my own dinner.

I want to tell you about a swimming couch named Bahar, classes in the pool with her gave a lot for our child. She sees a lot and corrects swimming techniques, she is a great professional. She speaks and conducts classes in many languages: English, Turkish, it seems, German (maybe more). Knows basic words for classes in Russian, but that’s even better - the child learns English while swimming, everything goes very calmly. It’s a pity that we found out about it a few days before departure and weren’t able to do a lot of studying, otherwise we wouldn’t have missed a single day.

Although everything in this hotel is at the same level, I would also like to mention the canteen workers and the chef, Miss Yana and the entire animation team, the cleaning staff, and the invisible people who organized all the processes.

It's expensive, but nothing pissed us off in 2 weeks, so it was worth the money. Wifi works everywhere and on the beach too. There is a limited menu from the canteen on the beach, but you don't have to come back for lunch.