Amphoras Blu Ultra-AI Adults Friendly — Hotel in South Sinai

Our stay at the Amphoras Blu was pleasant. Key thing to remember is that it is a 3-star hotel so if, like us, you have usually stayed in 4-star or 5-star then you will notice the difference. The whole hotel is a little dated and could do with refreshing. Lots of chipped paintwork, uneven paths and general tiredness. We had three rooms and one of them was a lot more in need of a refurb than the other two. However, from what we could tell, they have started to renovate some areas so perhaps they are already on with this.||The pool area is nice and the sun beds are comfortable with enough umbrellas and large beach towels. As with most hotels in Egypt, there are reps walking around the pool offering spa/recreating/beauty services but they aren’t too pushy. The lifeguards / pool guys are really helpful of you need beds / sun beds moving around. There is an area where you can get drinks (mainly self serve but, occasionally the waiter comes round and asks).||There is a beach with beach beds and umbrellas for hotel guests if you want to be on the beach (obviously man made as with most resorts in Egypt). We stayed around the pool so I can’t really offer more information about the service at the beach although there is a beach bar where guests can get their own drinks and they also serve burgers / pizza / fries / pasta at certain times of the day as well.||You can get into the sea via the jetty and the house reef is a lovely snorkelling site. People (being people) are slightly annoying when they’re clinging on to the stairs on their way in / out of the water and it can get a bit crowded. There is a lifeguard on the jetty who, frustratingly, would let people jump right off the top into the water which I’m pretty sure they weren’t supposed to do. Definitely worth taking a mask and snorkel as the sea is beautiful with lots of fish and corals to see.||Rooms are clean and attended to daily. Again, just in need of a little refresh. Water provided daily in the room and there are tea / coffee making services available in the room as well as a hairdryer.||The restaurant is ok. I wouldn’t have liked to have stayed and had to use it longer than a week as it gets same-y but, again, lots of all inclusive hotels are like that. The food was quite bland (although there was always an outdoor BBQ each night and this food was lovely). The white wine was good and lots of juice / cola / lemonade etc available. Huge shout out to Hamed who was absolutely amazing and very attentive. My husband had a bad cold whilst we were away and he gave him some medication which helped and honestly couldn’t do enough for us. Always smiling and welcoming, it was a pleasure to see him.||There was some evening entertainment (live music) which was nice if you were sitting outside having drinks. Conscious we have come a little out of season so there is probably more during the high season. ||We did use the spa at the adjoining sister hotel (Amphoras Beach) and had a wonderful full body massage plus scrub. Again, this hotel is currently being updated and I would imagine they will also do the spa as it is looking tired. Can’t fault the spa treatments though for the money and would recommend! ||There is a good dive centre on site. Unfortunately because of my husband’s cold we didn’t go diving but definitely would have done otherwise. If you haven’t tried diving then Egypt is the best place to try it and we usually always do a few days. ||Overall, I think we have been a bit spoilt by other hotels in Egypt that we’ve stayed in which have been a higher star rating so we wouldn’t return here but if you are accustomed to 3-star hotels then I think you would enjoy staying here. Fabulous weather as always. Lots of Russian guests which wasn’t great (sorry-not-sorry) and I think we were the only English which is unusual for Egypt...

From the moment we arrived at the hotel, the receptionist named Maher was causing us problems and seemed completely unwilling to help. We arrived a little earlier than the check-in time, and we were asked to wait. There were four of us (with two separate rooms), and we had informed them in advance that it was important for us to stay together in the same building. However, throughout our wait, we were constantly told that everything was fully booked. The “manager” was apparently sitting in his office but never came to speak with us directly; instead, he kept sending messages through the receptionist that there were no rooms. When we requested to speak with him, he didn’t even bother to come out.

They wanted to put us in rooms near a construction site, then in separate bungalows on opposite sides of the hotel. After our tenth trip to the front desk, where we were arguing and trying to get in touch with our tour company and threatening a bad review, rooms suddenly became available out of nowhere. It seemed like they had built a new wing in ten minutes! Eventually, they managed to accommodate us in rooms within the same building, and it turned out that most of the rooms in that building were empty. Why create problems when hotel staff should be helping guests?

Next situation: we accidentally left our room key in the restaurant. The waiters kindly took it to reception. But when we arrived to collect it, Maher at the front desk claimed he didn’t have the key and said we’d need to bring the waiter who took it to confirm. We ended up running around the entire hotel and restaurant three times. Thankfully, some friendly animators agreed to help us and translate our request to the waitstaff. Finally, with a team of three waiters at the front desk, Maher pulled the key from his desk. It was ridiculous and completely unnecessary.

Another point: there is only one iron for the entire hotel? An iron isn’t that expensive, but it would greatly increase guest comfort.

The animation team (Husem and Karim) were the only staff members who genuinely tried to help us. They constantly came up with new entertainment, and we truly appreciate their efforts. They’re the reason we’d even consider returning to this hotel. However, their microphone system is terrible—you can barely hear them, like an announcement at a noisy train station. Maybe it’s time to invest in a new microphone? More people might be interested in the activities if they could hear what was going on.

The kitchen, bar staff, and waiters were all very friendly, always smiling, and we’re grateful to them as well. The food was average, though there was one exceptional evening with many delicious Arabic dishes and desserts. However, the Arabic sweets were missing on other days. Is tahini sauce that difficult to provide? Why isn’t it available at breakfast?

Finally, about the late check-out extension: there are large signs with prices and timings for extended check-outs, but when we asked, they told us the hotel was fully booked 🤣 despite half of the rooms being empty.

Small problems like these, repeated over and over, left us with a very negative impression.

Thank you to the animators for bringing us smiles, but the overall experience could have been much better if the front desk staff understood...

This is not a negative review, but an honest one. The hotel is sat in lovely gardened grounds, they are not maintained however to the best standard that I have seen in other hotels, but very nice none the less. The hotel I would say is geared up for mostly Italian guests. My biggest gripe was the “music” by the pool, very heavy and loud Italian music, blasted out of a very bad speaker, you couldn’t hear yourself think at times let alone relax, there were times that it practically drove me to distraction, similar to what they play to torture the inmates at Guantanamo Bay. It just seemed such a strange thing to do as most of the people at the pool were over 50 and nobody was enjoying this racket, maybe the barman was? For me, I did not think the staff looked happy, they had no interest in the guests really, there was very little in the way of what I would call service. The plastic cups at the bar by the pool were all cracked and chipped, sometimes your drink was leaking out of them walking back to your sunbed. They all needed throwing out and replacing with something better. We did see rather an unedifying incident between a Russian and Italian women over a sunbed and it did turn physical, the pool staff did not separate them but just watched, it did seem to lend itself to the music though in a slap-stick kind of way, like a deranged birdy dance. I thought that there were not enough umbrellas for shade in my opinion, the sunbeds were in a bad state of disrepair, very symbolic of the hotel really as the hotel is quite dog eared in many places, some areas just needed a lick of paint, so not much of an expense needed to make things better. The rooms were very tired and old but this didn’t bother me, everything worked, just! The housekeeping in the room was a bit hit and miss, they do it every two days here, which is fine, but it was more of a cat lick clean I found. So as a budget hotel I can see past some of these issues, but where I cannot accept cut backs is with bottled drinking water and I’m afraid this did result in a complaint. There was no water in our room when we arrived, I was told initially it was one bottle a day, which as a diabetic is simply not enough. Instead of it just being replaced and replenished each day by housekeeping, you had to ring reception to ask for another bottle. This for me was unacceptable, safe drinking water should not be restricted in an all inclusive hotel. They did make a mends and toward the end of the holiday, the penny finally dropped with them and I was receiving sufficient bottles. This shouldn’t have needed to be an issue though. The restaurant food was good in my opinion, lots of choice but you won’t be writing home about it, it was ok/good on the whole. In conclusion this was a budget experience, don’t expect service here or luxury as you won’t find it. I would not rule out coming back here as a budget holiday, but only with realistic expectations. Do not suffer in silence however, if something is wrong, they need to be told. To end on a positive note, I’ve visited Egypt about 14 times, Cairo, Luxor, Taba, Hurghada and Sharm many times also and this hotel had the best WiFi I have ever experienced in Egypt, easily able to stream films, so I was...