Domes of Elounda, Autograph Collection — Hotel in Municipality of Agios Nikolaos

Short version: Great hotel for holiday on the beach with many amenities around and great for kids! Rent a car to check out the surrounding area.

Long version: We had a beautiful room overlooking the bay of Elounta and Spinalonga.

The beach and compound is very nicely built in high quality back in time but soon needs renovation. If you do not like to walk steep hills then you must wait for the golf carts to drive you up. They wait in front of reception during normal hours and come at a 5-10min interval after 9pm.

Front desk, house keeping and such is world class. F&B is a mixed bag, hence rent a car to try out restaurants in the neighbourhood.

Vilebrequin La Plage 4/5 stars The most expensive regular swim wear in the world has apparently added this venue as their fourth spot after Cannes, Miami and Doha - some expectation! Food at the restaurant is amazing and good value for money. Service from staff is as - f&b all over the resort - a total hit and miss…

Vilebrequin beach bar (+sun deck service) 4/5 Simple stuff but very enjoyable and fair priced.

Tholos - Breakfast buffet (and evening for HB) 2/5 The Classic all you can eat hotel hell. The real organisation and capacity issues of the hotel from an ambition versus what staff can/will deliver POV becomes apparent. Upto 25% of staff walk around like a NPC in a game looking for things to do during breakfast. You address something you need to a manager and they will throw crazy resources in terms of staff and services like table ordering at you. In general, at such prices and claimed 5 stars, the breakfast should have: Table ordering of basic items like scrambled eggs, eggs Benedict, avocado toast, etc Ordering of real coffee made by staff. Instead it is the auto coffee machine stuff coming out.

Tholos - The dinner buffet. 2/5 It is very tired and the clientele going there are clearly on a Half-Board mission. Fair enough, but why then be a five star hotel and not an all inclusive hotel….?

Core - food trucks al fresco 3/5 Great concept! But how is it possible that food trucks dishes are not juicy and greasy…? It is as if it is designed by weight watchers!! Almost all hot dishes were dry (hardly any sauce and meat was cooked into fossils) - and we tried it two nights of which one was Mexican night.

Blend - steak house dining at 70m pool. 2/5 Kitchen closes 21:45. We show up 21:30. It is a bit windy in a fascinating way of the scirocco hot air. We order 3 x Rib eye steaks medium cooked, eur 60 a pop plus some sides. Lo and behold the steaks are there within 5 minutes of us ordering! Slightly sceptical I cut mine open and it is rare inside…. The other is raw inside and the last feels the same from pressing with a fork. I send two of them back and they return them 8 minutes later much more cooked but now the juice is out since steaks cannot go off the frying pan and back on. We tell the waiters who fully agree and apologise. We are the last guests to leave at 22:30 and it is clear that demand from resident guests is only until kitchen open max 21:30.

Makris - fine dining 2/5 Great concept, mostly capable waiting staff, kitchen disaster. We ordered different fish starters which I would give 4/5 rating. Main courses pappardelle pasta with lobster and beef filet. The lobster arrives dry (so it is reheated from fridge or deep frozen). The beef fillet has been standing under the heating lamp for at least 10 min waiting for the pasta to finish and is dry as a sponge. 1/5. The desserts were alright but nothing resembling fine dining. It is my impression that there were max 2 people in the kitchen to deliver the fine dining experience which is naturally impossible considering the manpower required for such concept.

All in all, great beach and vibe. Very comfortable rooms but the Domes of Elounda needs to have rooms refurbished soon. F&B is mostly a feeding exercise often with comical value - change F&B manager / some concepts!

Spa - highly competent and friendly. Harris is the best therapist in town!

I shall return to see what has...

I wish I could write a 5 star review but a few things about our stay marred the experience.

First I’ll start with positives - the location is beautiful, there are 2 nearby towns and easy cab ride or moderate walk away, the sea is lovely. The staff is exceptionally nice and attentive and did everything they could to ensure our stay was good. Kids club is great too for a couple hours of playtime for the kids and freedom for the adults, and everyone there was kind.

The bad: We stayed in a 3 bedroom luxury residence with plunge pool. The unit was decent, though it showed signs of age despite recent remodels (eg crooked light fixtures in the master bedroom). Additionally the master bath is tiny, has no shower (only hand sprayer mounted low), 1 sink, etc. When we first got there, our master bath had no shampoo (only 2 conditioners and 1 body wash) and we had to ask them to bring some - just a lack of attention to detail. On 2 of our mornings, I found navel orange worms in the orange juice - still alive and wriggling! Not just once but twice. The first time the restaurant supervisor just said “hmm” and did nothing (didn’t even check the carafes they were poured from). The second day it happened they were extremely apologetic. The resort is spread out over a very large area so you are constantly having to take golf carts to get around in mid day heat with kids (I’d walk it myself but you’ll be sweating since the hills are steep too). It’s a little annoying since it easily takes 10-15 minutes to call and wait for a cart, and it sucks to forget something in your room and lose 20+ minutes. The kids pool is over 4’ deep, except a small baby pool that is approximately 10-12” deep. The other Domes resort we stayed at had a lovely sloped pool suitable for kids of all ages; 4’ deep is fine for competent swimmers and older kids but not 5 year olds. On our 2nd day we had 45 minutes to kill before picking our kids up from Kids Club, so we thought we’d order 1 cocktail and 1 yogurt bowl at the beach side bar. 30 minutes later they brought the wrong cocktail and no yogurt. 10 minutes later (no food still) we told them we had to go because we needed to pick our kids up and it takes 10 minutes to get back to Kids Club. To their credit they cleared the bill for us. Six hours after our last meal (at the Akti 1910 restaurant), both my youngest daughter and I came down with severe food poisoning and “evacuated” our contents, unfortunately on a flight back to the mainland. We both had the signature Lobster pasta which at the time I commented to my wife appeared slightly under cooked (but I assumed it was ok since it was fresh?). Wrong :( No late checkout despite being Marriott elite status members :(. Busy season I guess. Reservation system for dinner was annoying since we didn’t always know our days plans and it added stress to not be able to get the time slots we wanted even though the restaurants were rarely full anyways.

To the credit of the management, they graciously offered to take off our incidental charges (a couple of meals on site, roughly 200-300 EUR of charges out of a $7,000 EUR total stay). They mean well, but the execution quality just wasn’t there.

Despite all that, it’s still a lovely resort, just not a 5 star experience, more like a very nice 4 star? Compared to the facilities and attention to detail at Domes Zeen Chania, this stay was...

We had a fabulous week in Aug/Sept 22 as a family of four (4 and 7yo). We stayed in a haute living core one bedroom residence with a private pool, part of their new development at the top of the resort. We chose the hotel as it offered a family oriented, but high quality service and experience. We wanted our kids to be happy and entertained, we also wanted to be relaxed about them being noisy and normal kids. We chose the ‘Dine Around’ package which included a daily three course evening meal. The hotel, facilities and service options were truly outstanding, the main pool is beautiful with many sun loungers and always felt spacious and comfortable, same at the beach, the lovely bar staff delivered an ice bucket with bottles of water at the beginning of each day at the loungers. The beach was small yet pretty and welcoming, a shallow stretch quite protected to allow kids to swim happily. The restaurant options were varied, we booked but didn’t feel it had been essential. Our favourite was Topos 1910 at the beach on a Greek night, we were entertained by traditional dancers and fireworks. It was such a treat. The kids club also offered a lot of extras on top of twice daily sessions, bubble show one evening, cinema night another, face painting on a third. The Core food truck area had fabulous and beautiful displays of Greek Monsters, with a magnet wall for kids to create their own. Ours were occupied for hours there, and it was beautiful to look at as well, didn’t feel like a kiddie eyesore. Our four year old insisted to watch Hercules on the way home and yelped with excitement each time he recognised a monster. The Haute Living lounge was a nice benefit, we popped in for mid day snacks and drinks and bugged the concierge a lot for ideas and help with various bookings, she was so helpful.

Things to know: the resort is very big and spread out, so be prepared to walk between rooms and restaurants / activities. This gives a nice feel of space, we loved our spot on top of the hill with spectacular views. there are buggies to take you around the resort, figure out how to book them! an inland view in the residence actually had a fabulous bay sea view as well as mountains the prices are UK like, so food and drinks etc are quite steep compared to other prices you’ll see in Greece. Dine around becomes very good value. I think due to high-ish prices the portion sizes are enormous!! Particularly desserts which often seem big enough for four people bring cash for tips the kids club activities advertised seemed to be relatively short portions of the three hour sessions, so our 7yo tired of the kids club quite quickly service was typically Mediterranean, slow paced, so we found earlier restaurant bookings were better for our kids the resort is not walkable to town, and no shuttles provided, a hire car was incredibly helpful and enabled us to supplement the stay with some terrific local lunches food is typically pretty international rather than Greek so combining with local restaurants was a good approach for us at check in, ensure all the benefits available to you and facilities are detailed, it took us two days to learn about the haute living lounge and where to find it dress code! No flip flops in restaurant, my husband wasn’t prepared and didn’t have suitable light...