Hvar Places Hotel by Valamar — Hotel in Grad Stari Grad

The hotel was renewed in 2020 and that is very obvious. We enjoyed our 2 weeks stay very much. It's a modern hotel with modern facilities. Both suitable for youngsters, families and older people that enjoy a modern young environment with modern chill music. The rooms are big enough but not huge, it's for sleeping, for spending your time outside not inside. There's a fridge where you can store your own drinks or some food (see photo). A TV with chromecast and you can connect a hdmi cable if you want to. There's good wifi everywhere. Speeds changes a bit due to hotel occupation and time of the day. I speedtested 80 down/80Mbps up. Very good for a hotel and be able to do some work if you have to like me. Plenty of power sockets in the room, besides the bed the socket are equipped with both USB-A and usb-c plugs. The lobby seats have enough plug in the benches for your laptop. Some walls around the swimming pool where the cosy beds are also equipped with both 230Volt and USB-A plugs (not sure about USB-C but I guess so). The breakfast is very good and doesn't bore after 2 weeks. Snacks are good to. The restaurant evening food is not that great. It reminds me more of big kitchen food than restaurant. We did not took the all in formula (18€? pp) and I don't recommend it unless your are on a tight budget. It' s a 1520 minute walk to the restaurants in Stari Grad. If you go early 1819h30 you will always find a spot to eat. People tend to go eat very late, if you plan eating from 20hbor later, make a reservation. There are 2 restaurants that at the small beach around the corner where a little church or something in the sea, 5 minute walk from the hotel to Stari Grad. Both of these restaurants are very good and a reasonable price. Cheaper then the main city. Try them out if you wanna avoid the crowd of Stari Grad. Visit hvar the main city. There info about the bus (autocar) schedule (see my photo for the schedule) in the toerist office at the head of the port. The bus station if a few minutes further on the parking. The bus drives often, 35 minute comfortable drive to Hvar and cheap (27Kn?). A taxi ride to Hvar is up to 600Kn from or to the Hotel. There are no clubs in Stari Grad. One or 2 bars with louder music. For clubs and loud bars, goto Hvar. The ferry to split is pretty cheap and takes 2 hours. Do visit Split. Pay attention to the time table of the ferry (see photo). Our flight back from Split is at 9h20. It's imposible to get there in time, first ferry is at 5h30 and à 35 minute taxi to the airport. . So we had to cancel a day in the hotel and book a 1 night hotel in Split to be able to make the flight in time. You may wanna look at this before booking the hotel. There are ATM everywhere, restaurants seem to prefer cash, but you can pay with credit card almost everywhere. The swimming pool of the hotel is great and luxurus. The sea is nice to, beaches are concreet or pebbles. You can rent boats in Stari Grad, you can jetski in Hvar (around the Amfora Hotel). It's very hard finding any information or prices only about activities on Hvar like they haven't discovered the internet not yet or they don't want it to show online. So talk or call to the people on in the ports. I searched like crazy for some clif jumping but, we had to skip that. You can take a private boat with skipper in Hvar 550€, to the red rocks. But in split there's a guided and safe cliff jump to that starts at 9am for 40€ p.p. Make a reservation timely because we...

I don’t usually leave reviews but this is one of the best hotels my partner and I have stayed in! The hotel offers full flexibility for food and drink - upon arrival, we were given wristbands loaded with £350 to spend in the hotel across seven days. This could be spent on meals, drinks, even massages! It was absolutely perfect for us as it gave all the feel of an all-inclusive but with the freedom to wander into Stari Grad and explore the local cuisine for dinner. Some days we had lunch and dinner in the hotel, others we spent the whole day at krka falls or Hvar - it really was the perfect hotel to allow you to do a bit of both without feeling like you were wasting your daily spend.

The breakfast buffet was, hands down, the best I had seen in any hotel!! An amazing variety of sweet foods, hot breakfast, cold meats and fish, and fruit. You could even have Rosé for breakfast or make your own freshly squeezed juice! They also had oysters, which we never quite fancied for breakfast, but were impressed with the offering ;)

And the cocktails! I’ll be thinking of those cocktails for a really long time. Such an extensive list of classics as well as some unique concoctions. Every one I tried was delicious.

The pool area was great with lots of different types of beds to choose from. They also had hot tubs, a gym area, and ping pong, so there was never a shortage of things to do - not to mention the morning yoga on the beach and aqua aerobics that took place each day! DJ Sakussa would come out in the afternoon and play some great tunes to put you in a good mood. In some hotels the entertainment can be a bit too ‘in your face’ but the activities and music here was perfect. We also enjoyed laying in hammocks on the beach and going for early morning swims in the sea.

The only thing I would say is that it is located a bit far away from the town of Hvar and travelling to split takes the best part of 2 hours, with ferries that are quite infrequent. We had to get the 5:30 ferry to get to Split for our excursion to Krka Falls, which didn’t start until 10 but ferry times meant we had to leave very early. This meant that we made the most of the day, got to see plenty of split before heading out on our trip and then got to have dinner there before getting the ferry back, so we really did enjoy the day despite the early start! But I can imagine that if you were planning to go to Split several times in your trip, this journey would get a bit tedious. The town of Hvar is a half hour drive away but Places offer a cheap shuttle bus service running several times a day, which we made good use of! The return trips could do with running a bit later than 9:30 though, as it meant that you couldn’t really experience any of the nightlife.

The hotel is just a 15 minute walk from the charming town of Stari Grad, which is really peaceful and filled with authentic Croatian restaurants which we enjoyed sampling!

All in all, a fantastic trip. I would definitely return to a Places hotel and look forward to seeing these hotels appear in more destinations - they...

If you are looking for a relaxing and calm vacation this is not the place unfortunately. It isn’t terrible but there were quite a few things that disappointed us during this stay. The room is tiny! There is not even enough space to have a carry on suitcase open. Bathroom is in dire need of a refresh. Plus our a/c was broken and after multiple attempts at contacting staff and people coming (or not showing up) to try to fix it we eventually gave up instead of waiting around in our room for half the days for them to come. So it was HOT. This place is loud. Especially when they have the dj outside there is no escaping the loud blaring music even in the rooms or by the water it’s very loud until late. You would think they would take the hint when no-one is near the dj area or when you have to yell to the person sitting next to you are the bar/restaurant area. All of the beach beds anywhere near the water are “occupied” by towels and bags by sunrise. Not a person in sight until after 9am. The chairs are all taken I the same way by 8am. So if you are not up by the crack of dawn you have no where to sit for the rest of the day. The way the staff is dressed was shocking to us. Undone overalls, oversized t shirts and what looks like lanyard backstage concert passes as ID. I didn’t think that was the staff at first as it was so ridiculous. Plus everyone aside from the front desk and handyman was so rude. They plow straight through you when you walk, coffee machine was down and I just got a shrug when I notified them. I was refilling my water bottle with the provided water and a staff member snatched it our of my hand, put her hand all over the mouthpiece and said I can’t refill it here… The breakfast has a decent variety but it’s in an outdoor/indoor setting so there are flies all over the meat and fish as it just sits out. Soy milk had also gone bad and was chunky. Not surprising as it’s left out in the heat. The other food and drinks are overpriced for the quality. The greens side that came with almost every dish was disgusting (tasted like frozen or old greens that were unseasoned and just microwaved) and because everything is ordered by QR code we were told we could not sub it. You have to pay for them to give you clean beach towels everyday or are stuck with wet ones. They are thick so they don’t dry overnight. I understand being environmentally conscious but then at least give quick dry towels. Especially if it unexpectedly pours all night and everyone’s towels get soaked outside. I really liked how the wifi worked down and the beach. It was nice of them to give us a bottle of wine as it was one of our birthdays bring the stay. The path that you can take down to town was convenient and so was parking. The rooms were overall clean. Overall it wasn’t a total disaster but I am glad we didn’t stay here during our...