Lindos Royal Resort

“Amazing time”

I was so nervous coming here after reading all the reviews but we have had an amazing time. The rooms are a little dated but you can see that they are working on these to bring them more up to date. Normally as a family of 4 we are all squashed into 1 room but with the family room they have a sli… more

I was so nervous coming here after reading all the reviews but we have had an amazing time. The rooms are a little dated but you can see that they are working on these to bring them more up to date. Normally as a family of 4 we are all squashed into 1 room but with the family room they have a sliding partition which acted like a second room. To be fair we were never in our rooms. The swim up rooms look amazing I wish we would of booked these instead The food has been lovely I have 2 very fussy children who have a very beige diet. There was something here for them to eat every day, the pool bar snacks changed every day and they were always happy to make something fresh if you preferred. Also of a day I preferred to go to main restaurant at lunch where there was an option for fresh home made pizzas in the ovens these were the best pizzas ever. Around the food area there was always someone from the kitchen re filling the stations The staff all over the hotel never stopped working and nothing was never to much bother. I had an issue with our safe which was fixed within 15 minutes. We are not really big drinkers so tended to sit on the area above the bar on the couches which was always very relaxing. Lindos is only a 5 minute Taxi drive so we went there for 2 nights in the week There is always plenty of sunbeds which ever pool you are at. They are always cleaned every morning I would say the hotel is more like a 3/4 star rather than a 5. The views from hotel are amazing and it is the most relaxed hotel Iv had in a while I would recommend this hotel as we have had such a lovely time

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“The Five-Star Mirage: A Magnificent 3.5-Star Resort Overburdened by Small Print”

In the glossy brochure of modern travel, the term “Five-Star” is tossed around with the reckless abandon of confetti at a shotgun wedding. It implies a world of effortless luxury, where your worries are ironed out by a staff that anticipates your whims before you have even fully formed them. Sadly,… more

In the glossy brochure of modern travel, the term “Five-Star” is tossed around with the reckless abandon of confetti at a shotgun wedding. It implies a world of effortless luxury, where your worries are ironed out by a staff that anticipates your whims before you have even fully formed them. Sadly, the Lindos Royal in Rhodes is a five-star hotel only in the minds of its marketing department and whatever bureaucratic committee hands out plaques in Greece. Clearly, the product teams at easyJet Holidays and TUI, who brand it as a five-star resort, have probably never actually spent a night here; to award this property such a rating is an act of pure, optimistic fiction. A cursory glance at the collective outcries from May’s TripAdvisor dispatches confirms the reality: it is a perfectly respectable, hardworking 3.5-star establishment. To compare it to a true bastion of luxury, such as an Ikos resort, is like comparing a reliable family hatchback to a bespoke Aston Martin. They both have wheels, but only one makes you feel glad to be alive. Our descent into this velvet trap began at check-in. We had travelled to the Aegean for our daughter’s wedding, burdened with seventy kilograms of luggage, essentially an entire haberdashery of formalwear. We were escorted to our booked 'Deluxe Sea View' room, a space so comically hostile to storage that it offered a single wardrobe and two lonely drawers. It was entirely untenable; a space designed for two ascetics with a single loincloth between them, not a British couple attending a Mediterranean marriage. Yet, out of the architectural bleakness stepped the resort’s true saving grace: the Front Office Manager, Valasia. Where the room's infrastructure failed, she triumphed. Confronted with our logistical nightmare, she did not hesitate, haggle, or resort to the usual bureaucratic shoulder-shrugs. With a sharp, decisive efficiency that belongs in a much finer establishment, she immediately upgraded us to a human-sized room. It was early in the season, thankfully, but her flawless professionalism single-handedly saved our holiday from curdling into a disaster in hour one. Beyond the reception desk, where Ivan was most helpful and polite, dispensing the sort of smooth, unflappable charm usually reserved for handling erratic minor royalty, the hotel’s aesthetic foundations are genuinely satisfactory. The pools are good, not pristine. They provide a sprawling labyrinth of azure water kept clean and treated, but very cold. The buffet food, too, is a triumph of volume and decent flavour; you will certainly not starve, nor will you ever be surprised. It is plentiful and varied, a vast geography of sustenance. However, while the structural cleanliness of the dining room is nothing short of exceptional, the atmosphere refuses to rise above the clatter and echo of a municipal canteen. The staff do their absolute best, scuttling about with the frantic energy of un-nested ants, but they are fighting a losing battle against the architecture of mass catering. Furthermore, the resort stumbles on the most basic hurdles of presentation; they cannot, it seems, be tasked to wipe the water spots from the plates. Instead, they provide stacks of paper tissues at the side of the crockery mountain, inviting guests to manually polish the damp drips off their own plates before loading them up with moussaka. It is a marvellous touch of five-star DIY. A special shout-out and heartfelt thank-you must be extended to Stavros. He navigated the breakfast chaos with a perennially warm smile and an enviable, razor-sharp efficiency, even managing the minor miracle of remembering our absurdly complicated coffee order day after day. It is a testament to his character that he managed to inject a necessary dose of humanity into what otherwise felt like a military feeding operation. The dining room is also the only time during the day you are permitted to glimpse a drink served in an actual glass. To obtain a proper vessel anywhere else, you must subject your wallet to a premium surcharge in the lobby bar. For the British traveller, this triggers a very specific, tribal sort of psychological trauma. There is an unwritten, sacred contract embedded in the British soul regarding the "All-Inclusive" holiday: we pay a king’s ransom upfront precisely so we can leave our wallets locked in the room and live like medieval lords. To be told that our prepaid status only entitles us to plastic, and that glass requires actual cash, is an ideological mugging. It goes entirely against our national grain. We aren't being cheap; it's the principle of the thing. Why am I paying a premium to drink out of a glass when I already bought the entire hotel for ten days? Where the staff are heroic, the hotel’s corporate policy operates like a miserly accountant. True luxury includes; it does not ration. For example, the hotel’s climate control is governed not by the actual, sweltering Mediterranean heat, but by a rigid, bureaucratic calendar. The air conditioning remains legally dead until the first of June. By a marvellous stroke of calendar coincidence, that happens to be today, meaning the switch will finally have been flicked, but for those of us visiting in May, guests were trapped in a claustrophobic catch-22: sweat it out in a sealed room, or open the balcony doors and invite the local insect population inside. Foolish travellers, unaccustomed to the climate, sat with lights blazing and windows wide, leaving the mosquitoes to zone in like heat-seeking missiles on the rising plumes of human CO2 and perspiration, treating the unventilated rooms like an all-you-can-eat buffet. The result was a horrendous menagerie of lower-limb carnage; we witnessed some truly horrific, swelling bites on fellow guests. If you are reading this before travelling in May next year, it is vital that you pack your DEET, accept the heat, and do not subject yourself to this trauma. Better still, Lindos Royal, simply factor a few extra euros into the room rate and activate the climate control early so your paying guests can sleep with the glass shut. To add insult to injury, a scan of the small print reveals a charge of thirty-five Euros simply to use the room safe. It is the hospitality equivalent of being mugged by the person holding your coat. Then we come to the liquids, and they require no sommelier to diagnose their shortcomings. Here, we entered the realm of the "part-time all-inclusive." At lunchtime, the draught beer and wine possess the distinct, underwhelming character of being aggressively watered down. Two pints in, and you feel entirely unchanged, save for needing the bathroom, largely because the drinks arrive not from a bottle but via the depressing hiss of a pressurised soda pump. The cocktails, meanwhile, are a transparent joke, syrupy, neon concoctions engineered by automated vending machines. Occasionally, these are poured into a metal shaker by a remarkably friendly and helpful bartender who shakes it with tremendous, theatrical gusto in a desperate, valiant attempt to convince you that some actual human labour went into making your drink. Ultimately, it is a grand performance of illusion, and we found ourselves escaping the resort grounds in the evenings simply to discover what a proper, un-watered drink actually tasted like. Not saying they are, they just taste like it! There is a distinct lack of poolside service, forcing guests to fetch their own drinks in plastic cups like thirsty schoolchildren. Once back at your station, the battle for survival begins in earnest, courtesy of the hotel's ridiculously miniature parasols. Providing next to no sufficient shade, they force you into a weary, hourly game of high-stakes sun-bed chess, shifting your lounger around like a heavy plastic piece on an azure board, trying desperately not to breach a neighbour's square. Fortunately, it was quiet during our May visit, but one shudders to imagine the territorial warfare that must erupt here in the height of summer. The management urgently needs to scrap these pathetic canopies and invest in umbrellas of a civilised size. As it stands, a terrifying number of my fair-skinned compatriots simply abandon the shade altogether, choosing instead to lounge until they resemble a colony of aggressively boiled lobsters. Worse still is the utilisation of the resort's spaces. The lobby bar is arguably the most elegant, visually stunning architectural asset in the complex. Yet, because the hotel demands a premium cash surcharge for a proper glass, it sits completely deserted. It is an unpopular concept, so the finest room in the hotel sits entirely devoid of life, a monument to corporate greed. Ultimately, the Lindos Royal is a lesson in expectation management. If you come here expecting the seamless, friction-free paradise of a true luxury resort, you will find the micro-transactions and mechanical cocktails an insult to your intelligence. But if you accept it for what it truly is, a clean, sun-drenched, friendly 3.5-star resort with spectacular pools and exceptional staff like Valasia, Ivan, and Stavros, you will have a perfectly grand time. Just make sure you pack some mosquito spray, a heavy dose of patience, and for heaven’s sake, don’t arrive until June.

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