Hotel Letsos, Zante

...my boyfriend stayed at the Hotel Letsos in Alykanas, Zante in August/September 2008 after booking thtough Olympic Holidays. We'd read a lot of mixed reviews so we didnt really know what to expect!

I'm not sure how much the hotel cost on its own, but we paid around £400 each for flights and accommodation for 2 weeks. Depending on what your looking for, we found it to be OK for us.

The hotel is about an hour away from ...
...hoping and praying that our hotel would be nice and from the outside it looked lovely. Like all the hotels in Zante, the pool was at the front, and it's actually quite big. The entrance is marble floored and well lit. The reception area is also marble floored, i think it must have been recently refurbished. There are safes at reception where we kept our passports and jewellry. You have to leave a deposit but you get it back after checking out.
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Me and my boyfriend stayed at the Hotel Letsos in Alykanas, Zante in August/September 2008 after booking thtough Olympic Holidays. We'd read a lot of mixed reviews so we didnt really know what to expect!

I'm not sure how much the hotel cost on its own, but we paid around £400 each for flights and accommodation for 2 weeks. Depending on what your looking for, we found it to be OK for us.

The hotel is about an hour away from the airport if you're taking a coach transfer, so it will be considerably less by taxi. After dropping everyone off, I was hoping and praying that our hotel would be nice and from the outside it looked lovely. Like all the hotels in Zante, the pool was at the front, and it's actually quite big. The entrance is marble floored and well lit. The reception area is also marble floored, i think it must have been recently refurbished. There are safes at reception where we kept our passports and jewellry. You have to leave a deposit but you get it back after checking out.

The Staff:
It's a family run hotel, and I think the wife kind of runs the show! She was very friendly, and always said hello and made conversation when we saw her at breakfast etc. The husband on the other hand was quite distant, and it felt like he just couldnt be bothered a lot of the time. If i had to ask something at reception, i'd feel uncomfortable if it was him, as he just seemed to grunt a lot. I dont think his English was as good as his wife's or daughters so that could have been why! Their daughter was lovely, and spoke English very well, she studied in London, there's a picture of her on reception! She was very helpful, i had to ask her to translate a leaflet i got in some seasickness tablets and she was really helpful. the bar staff and the cleaners and breakfast staff we all friendly enough, but we didnt speak to them that much so kinda limited there!

The Room:
Our room was a decent size, kind of standard for holiday apartments. It was better than the accommodation in Tenerife where we last went on holiday anyway! It had a decent sized bathroom and a main room which housed the 'kitchen area', the beds and then out to the balcony. The kitchen really left a lot to be desired! If you're the kind of person who likes to cook on holiday, then this is most definetly not for you! The sink was small and it took ages to work out how to turn the 2 ring electric hob on, we'd have to turn it on about half an hour before we wanted a cup of tea! Also, there's no kettle...they use a small pan type thing to boil their water, so i was always paranoid about making sure it was properly boiled (which it never seemed to) so i wouldnt get an upset stomach. The plates, cutlery and cups were all old, but we only used them to literally make tea and eat sandwiches off of. Again, it's pretty standard to most self catering holiday apartments, but it didnt encourage you to want to make a gourmet meal there! There was also a small fridge, which was fine for milk, water etc.

In terms of the 'main' bit of the room, we had 2 single beds which we pushed together, a nice big wardrobe with hangars and more than enough space for us to hang up our clothes, and it had blankets in the bottom which really came in handy towards the end of the 2 weeks as it got chilly at night. There was also a dressing table with mirror and 2 chairs and a stool. The room also comes with a TV which was free of charge and had around 30 channels, mostly Greek or German, and Sky and BBC news. A lot of the channels showed American soaps with Greek subtitles, so there was more often than not something to watch, and as we were there during the olympics, we watched that most of the time. It also showed films at night in English, but as i warned in my review of Zante, the ad breaks take forever and a day and you tend to forget what you were watching in the first place!

The balcony was a decent size, it had a small table with two chairs and we had a fantastic view of the hills across the way.

A note about the air conditioning - it's EXPENSIVE!! 15 Euros a day to be exact. We decided not to take it, and we didnt find it to be a problem, as we kept the balcony door open during the day and night, so I feel like we would have been ripped off if we'd have shelled out for it. It does depend on you though, it can get really hot and humid, but we coped with it OK. The hotel felt very secure and was really quiet at night.

The room was generally well equiped, plenty of sockets for us to use and it never felt too cluttered, even with our suitcases and lilo lying around!

The bathroom as i said was a decent size, however the shower took some getting used to. It was quite difficult to get the temperature just right between hot and cold, but more often than not, i was so hot from walking back from the beach that i didnt care and a cold shower was perfect! The showers do leak though, but this is an accepted part of life in Greece, and there are drains in the centre of the floor to deal with it. Also, it's worth noting that you cant flush anything down the toilet, its something to do with their drainage system. There are bins in every toilet (restaurants included) where you put your tissue. It does feel a bit odd at first, and i forgot a couple of times and then panicked, luckily it flushed away. Because the toilet paper will flush away its tempting to just flush it all the time, but i just had to remember that i was in another country and you have to respect the way things work. The bins are emptied daily, so there's never any problems with smells or feeling unhygienic. (sounds gross but you need to know these things!)

If there was one big let down, it was the maid service. We would normally expect the sheets and towels to be changed every other day as a minimum, and they were changed 2 days after we arrived. After that, they were only changed once. I dont quite understand why as we would come back from the beach and the rubbish would be emptied, floor mopped, the beds made, but the towels and sheets would be unchanged. I'd smudged a bit of nail polish on my sheet and it was an obvious marker that they hadn't been changed. My boyfriend reported it to reception after about 3 days of it being unchanged, and they promised it would be done, but a couple of days later it still hadn't. In the end we had to ask for clean towels and sheets and do it ourselves. They were then changed about 2 days later, having said that, the hotel felt clean. We never had any problems with insects (aside from mosquitos) and we usually expect to see at least one cockroach, but we saw not one!

The Food:
Although the hotel is self catering, there is a restaurant area which serves breakfast lunch and dinner. We only ate breakfast there so I cant tell you what the lunch and dinner was like, but breakfast was good for what it was. It cost about 10 Euros in total i think (5 euros each) and it was eat as much as you like buffet. Every day there was cereal, it was cheap cornflakes with warm milk and i loved it, much better than kellogs!! Then there was thick slices of bread that you could toast on the conveyor toaster if you chose, and then help yourself to jam, boiled eggs, ham, sausages (more like hot dogs than the sausages we're used to), natural yoghurt, feta chees as well as sliced cheese, and tea or coffee. The selection changed every other day but they were the main staples. Myself, i'm always a bit wary of eating sausages etc on holiday, so for me it was cereal toast and jam, sometimes with an egg or two. The tea and coffee were ok, but there was no fresh juice! it was like diluted cordial and was really horrible so i never had it again! They replenished the food pretty quickly as well, and most of the guests were already eating at 8am. We never missed a breakfast so i think they probably stopped serving at around 10am.

The restaurant area is really nice, plenty of tables and well decorated, and there are a few tables outside as well. It's worth noting that you'll need suncream, even that early in the morning because the sun seems to rise right behind the restaurant and within a few minutes you'll feel your skin begin to burn! it was nice and clean, HOWEVER, there were bees all over the place, and it would get really annoying as they'd just hover around you constantly. One morning we even had one invade my plate and start eating my jam!! We were never bitten, but you had to constantly fan the food so if you dont like bees i'd advise you stay indoors. The owners would often take their breakfast as well, and it was nice to have a chat with them.

We didnt spend much time at the hotel, we spent one day at the pool, but to be honest, the beach is the reason we came on holiday in the first place! It's a decent sized pool with a fair number of loungers and parasols. If you have kids theres a separate kids area which is shallow so they have somewhere to play. Again, the main problem was the bees as they'd hover around the shower so it was quite nerve wracking stepping in and out of it! The bar is nicely done up, we only went there once for a quiz night which was ok, not the best i've ever been to, but it was run by Olympic Holidays so we thought we'd give it a go. It happens once a week and it's the standard pub quiz, prizes being free drinks or free dinner in the restaurant. there is a pool table at the back, but it's not a really lively bar, as none of the bars are in Aykanas. There were lots of families around and it was relaxing not to have to worry about lager louts or trouble being caused.

The Location:
For us it was perfectly situated. It's around a 10 minute walk to the beach, which in the afternoon on the way back feels like forever because it's so hot, but in the morning it's lovely. You walk past a lot of olive trees and 'farms' of goats and one morning we saw about 5 chickens crossing the road which was lovely, as we'd never see anything like that in London! If you are going to go to the beach though, take your cash out before hand as it's a killer walking back in the middle of the day to get money for lunch! If you do need somewhere to eat for lunch, the Valais hotel has a lovely beach side bar. The food is very reasonably priced, and the chips and beans are lovely! The smoothies were also fantastic and freshly made with whatever combination you want. There's also an internet service which was very cheap and a couple of pool tables.

There are about 3/4 supermarkets selling everything you need fron drinks to alka seltzer, papers, magazines and cigarettes, although the papers were updated every other day so check before you go and buy The Sun or whatever as it could have been from the day before! There are a good few restaurants, the best being La Caretta- the food and service was flawless and we ended up eating there most nights. There are a few souvenir shops, which sell everything you'd expect, and we found everything on the island to be reasonably priced. Dinner would cost around 25 euros for 2 courses and a few drinks.

The area gets busy at night, but it's relaxed and friendly and at a slow pace. As I said, it's very much a family resort and you feel quite safe wandering around. it all tends to die down around midnight so i got the most peaceful sleeps ever!

There's also a car/quad hire company across from the hotel, we rented a quad for the day for 20 euros, very reasonably priced and we kept it overnight too.

For us, the hotel was perfectly situated, quiet, generally efficient and it felt safe. There was always someone on reception, although at night some of the lights in the corridor s didnt work so you'd have to find your way in pitch black. Considering there are multiple entrnaces to the hotel, it should have felt unsafe, but it didnt. Alykanas doesnt come across as a violent place, and i had no problems in making the trip back to the hotel on my own if i had to nip to the shop.

From what i saw on the drive to and from the airport, the hotel letsos looked a lot better than most. I just hope they sort the maid service out, because it was the only real let down. I'm hoping to go back this year with my mum and siblings, and we'll probably stay there again! 

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