Kosea — Hotel in Municipality of Kos

I will attempt to provide a fair overview of my experience at the KoSea Boutique Hotel in the hope it may be of assistance to you when making a decision to visit yourself.||Overall a mixed experience with many good and bad points. ||First the Good.|Staff are very pleasant and helpful, not only at the hotel but everywhere we visited in Kos. The breakfast buffet food was fine and we thought the food was more than acceptable with a good selection. Our room (junior suite with sea view) was nicely furnished with a very good bed. All the soft furnishings were very good including sheets, pillows and the plentiful towels. Air conditioning is silent and works perfectly with the simple wall control. Plenty of wall sockets and a flat screen tv although not a smart tv so only BBC World service & MTV available in English. Bathroom was a little on the small side but perfectly functional with plenty of hot water. Drinks at the poolside bar seemed reasonable with the exception of Gin & Tonic (10 euros). Other typical drinks – small bottle of Coke 3.5 euros – small bottle of local beer, 5 euros – glass of local wine 4.5 euros – coffee (latte) 3.9 euros. ||Now for the Bad.|I need to address the major problem not only with the hotel but with Kos town in general and this is the extremely busy road right outside the front of the hotel. I always extensively read reviews and watch video’s before visiting a new place. This problem rarely gets a mention in any review which seems unbelievable given the sheer amount of traffic here.||Just by the very picturesque ancient castle, is a busy ferry port. There are many high speed passenger ferries and a regular stream of full size “roll on – roll off” vehicle ferries carrying articulated lorries, tour buses, cars etc. Virtually all this traffic comes past the front door of the hotel. Lorries parked below my window with engines running at 5am whilst the driver grabs a coffee is common. The noise is constant and very annoying.||Having paid for a junior suite with sea view, we found that instead of enjoying the stunning view, we had the constant drone of traffic which is not what I expected. If I could choose one word to describe the driving here, then I would use “Manic”. Trying to cross the road involves taking your life into your own hands. Heavy goods vehicles racing down the road, horns blaring to move pedestrians out of the way, scooters racing around them etc makes it very difficult to cross the road. Once you do cross, the pedestrian is then confronted by a “cycle lane”. This is also extremely busy with the amount of cyclists here which consist of many electric cycles racing along. In addition there is the constant menace of electric scooters and motor scooters that also use this lane as a race track.||If you have any mobility issue or have young children, perhaps a pushchair then I suggest this is a serious problem.||Had to mention this problem first as if I had known about it beforehand, I would simply have ruled the hotel and town out and looked elsewhere. ||“Tourist Tax”. I’d never heard of it before our trip and had never been to Greece before but be prepared to hand over a 10 euro, per room, per night tax, before you get your key! Nasty little shock. Apparently it goes towards eco sustainability!||Sea View. As mentioned you will only get the drone of traffic so waste of money paying the extra. Pool view at the rear would be quieter if it was not for the building at the rear of the hotel being gutted by workmen using noisy power tools and lorries delivering building supplies whilst your trying to relax. More noise and nowhere to get away from it at the hotel.||The hotel is called a “Boutique Hotel” and the pictures tend to show a small frontage building with a small pool and pool bar. However, if you read the details offered by the tour operator, there are 73 rooms here. Some are family rooms so capacity is somewhere around 150 – 200 people. Plenty of pictures about of the pool area so you can see there are 18 sunbeds. The numbers speak for themselves. There are other chairs around the pool but they are not sunbeds. In addition, the breakfast room also has limited capacity. If I had to guess, I would say seating capacity for around 80 – 100. This would be fine if people wished to have breakfast at different times, but we experienced most people turned up around 10.00– 10.15am as I assume most people on holiday do not wish to get up early. Hence be prepared to wait for a table at times and for the mad scrum to get food from the buffet. In short, the facilities here are geared up for a much smaller hotel capacity.||In Summary, although the rooms are nice and staff very friendly, the hotel has grown more bedrooms than the facilities can cope with. Traffic issues and noise is very bad. The hotel is not cheap and I feel it represented poor value for the money we spent. For all these reasons, sadly, I could not recommend The KoSea Boutique Hotel. ||As for Kos town itself, once you get into the quaint back streets away from the traffic it is very impressive with lots of great places to eat the fabulous food on offer here at very reasonable prices. But, everywhere around the harbour has the manic traffic which spoils the town. It is more like a city break.||I hope the...

The wall of text that follows is a direct reflection of the breadth and depth of utterly dismal customer service at this hotel. TLDR; comically indifferent customer service, no shuttle from the port/airport to the hotel despite what the hotel website and Booking dot com claim, and a laughably juvenile response from management. Pro-tip for canceling, day-of, via Booking dot com at the bottom.

This is by far the worst, most shockingly indifferent customer service experience I’ve ever had. From luxury suites down to backpacker hostels and everything in between, this alleged 4-star establishment takes the ignominious cake.

There is no shuttle or airport transfer service, despite what it says on Booking and despite it being plastered across the concierge services section of the hotel's own website.

Instead, when you attempt to book this "service," they give you some obscure local phone number to call, content to leave you, a paying customer, entirely at the whims of whoever is on the other end of the line. As it turns out, it's the island's mercurial taxi service, which can— and routinely does— leave you on hold for an eternity. The hotel literally gives you no choice but to wait until the taxi service's operator— again, not a hotel shuttle— picks up the phone. Unluckily for me, the line was either busy or left me on hold for over an hour and a half.

Inconveniently, the hotel didn't tell me they are limited to only using a taxi service FROM the hotel and cannot (and will not) arrange for pickup from other locations TO the hotel until AFTER I had booked.

So, zero effort was offered whatsoever to assist me with transport from the port of Mastihari to the hotel. That may have been just as well if they'd made the effort to be understanding. After all, I am a paying guest, am clearly not a local, and am not accustomed or expecting to spending entire half-days days of vacation time on hold with unresponsive and far-flung taxi operators in Greece. On top of that, as I informed them, I had recently sustained an injury that severely limited my mobility.

Gallingly, they chose to treat the repeated pleas for help from a quite literally stranded, paying guest as an inconvenient bother. I decided that I would rather lose the money I'd already paid for the room and to make myself jump through more administrative, financial, and metaphorical hoops than to spend any more time trying in vain to get to the hotel.

After all, better to inconvenience myself by booking another room at the last minute in more civilized accommodations, waking up in the wee hours of the next morning, hobbling aboard a red-eye ferry ride to Kos from Kalymnos in order to catch an early morning flight, and losing the 170-odd euros I’d already paid for the room— than to complicate my life any more than Kosea already did.

When I told them my decision, having tried in vain to secure transport, they curtly told me to “enjoy your time in Kalymnos,” huffed about having other guests to worry about, and hung up.

A microcosm of their disgraceful lack of accountability or respect can be found, for your convenience, in their inept reply to this review, and in the hand-wringing and dithering on full display in their response to every other review below that might contain the smallest whiff of criticism.

Apparently, unlike every other hospitality establishment in the world, nothing at all is ever (or ever has been) their fault.

Who knew?

So, stay far, far away if you wish to be treated with a minimum iota of courtesy.

*Pro-tip if you booked through Booking dot com, like I did. I didn't know this until it was too late (you better believe I called Booking to complain about this hotel) but apparently if you call the Booking customer service line while you are trying to cancel with the hotel, Booking can put pressure on the hotel to at least partially reimburse you. Oh, don't forget to mention the part about how the hotel advertises a shuttle service— Booking dot com REALLY didn't like what they heard when I informed them about the reality of...

Having just recently stayed at this hotel June 2024 I can highly recommend staying. It isn’t your big style hotel but as it states it’s boutique so is quite small but adequate. We stayed in a room with a pool view which was nice but having seen the view from the front of the hotel I can imagine a sea view room been much recommended. The room is a good size with a sofa, very comfortable bed and dressing table. You will find all the things you’d expect in the wardrobe, iron,safe,slippers,robes,plenty of hangers which was great compared to the usual 4 in most hotels. There’s basic tea and coffee but if you wish to have coffee pods you get 2 free then every other one is €1.50, which for the price of the rooms seems quite steep considering most hotels we’ve stayed in the pods just get refilled daily. There’s a balcony with table and chairs and a handy little wall dryer rack. The bathroom is an unusual one, this was really the only bit of a disappointment as the toilet and shower room was very small, and you have to do quite an awkward move to get in and close the door before you can get to the toilet. For any one slightly larger it would be quite a snug fit with not much room to move. And this then brings me to the strange point of then having to walk out of your bathroom back to the bedroom to use the sink for any reason washing, teeth,etc. For us having the sink in the bedroom was definitely not an ideal situation I understand Boutique can be a little different but this was impractical but had obviously been done this way as the bathroom has been designed too small to accommodate the sinks, also the lotions on the wall were empty on arrival so we had to ask twice for some and eventually a bottle was placed in the shower. However it is only a room to stay in at the end of the day and didn’t spoil our stay. Breakfast is adequate and does its job but it is a basic selection of everything you’d expect to find from dried fruits,cereal,pastries,egg of all kinds cooked meats cheese etc be it on a small select scale and the same every day, not the wide variety you’d find in a larger hotel with more choice and different things daily. A few things I found strange all though I get why it was done for money saving purposes etc…. Was you only get one cup at breakfast and one set of cutlery so once you’ve finished,if your to leave the table and go get something else just be advised to make sure your cutlery and cup don’t get taken or you won’t have another, there are no cups at the coffee / tea machine. Also for us a big let down and the first time in travelling many countries there was no toaster a basic item a lot of people use for breakfast. The hotel itself is in a fantastic location to the harbour and local sight seeing attractions with most main sights in a 10/15 minute walk depending how hot it is, and there’s a very convenient little supermarket next door which is handy for water or a bottle of wine etc. The pool area is clean and has a life guard on 10am till 6.30pm when they start pool maintenance . The only thing for me is I’m more than happy to swim at my own risk without a guard and would have appreciated been able to swim early morning around 7.30/8 when it’s nice and quite before everyone else crowds around it for the day. The pool area does get very full quickly and there aren’t that many beds so if your the sort of person who likes to lay around a pool all day get up early 😂 Overall I can recommend this hotel and I would...