Ilios — Hotel in Municipality of Thessaloniki

Room 508 is clean with a nice view. Bathroom is bright (though small like most other Greek inns/hotels) includes hotel-grade mini shampoo and shower gel bottles. For the price (35 Euros) this is a good stay. The front desk managers, however, are xenophobes. The first desk manager was rude to my husband (Albanian): After leaving our things in the room, we went downstairs to go out for the night. My husband needed to retrieve his passport from the desk manager. The desk manager was helping other patrons at the time. Instead of apologizing for taking a while with our passport, he said to my husband "I'm not done with your passport, you have to wait if you want it back!" My husband grew up in Greece and is well-aware of racism in this country, said something to me about police random checking ID, in which I responded with a comment about this being illegal in the U.S. (racial profiling). The desk manager said to me "Don't lie to me about America! I know what they do. The police grab people and do 'bang-bang!!" Wow... I almost got into an argument with this MF. After we returned to the hotel for the night, another desk manager was on call. He was worse than the first. He gave me and my husband (esp. my husband) the nastiest look you can find from anyone, and almost threw the key at him.

So... Will we ever come back here EVEN if the room is clean and the price is right? No. We have no tolerance for racism in a touristy section of any country. Given the country is in a debt crisis and requires America and other nations to bail it out, it should be thankful that tourists are here to improve its economic situation. Racism is tolerated in other parts of the country when they see very little of non-Greeks, but it's...

Greece is a beautiful country with great people. Unfortunately, the receptionist in the hotel we've stayed in on the last night of our vacation had no respect for privacy, welfare or safety of the guests. He forced us to leave the key when we wanted to go out, and informed us that he can go inside our room even without us leaving our key. ||Besides, the entire hotel smells from ciggarettes, and the air conditioner in our room was broken.||A few nights before we've stayed in a much better place across the street from Illios, for a much better price (which I believe because it wasn't on a weekend, unlike the last night of our vacation which was Saturday). You can find better places than this one for the same price.||DON'T GO TO HOTEL ILLIOS IN...

I give it four stars for its great location. The building was somewhat old. We stayed on the 7th floor with a balcony overlooking Egnatia Street. It is convenient to have a small lift. Here, one shouldn't expect too much from an old building. However, if you could appreciate a clean room, then you won't be disappointed. The bed and pillows were okay. The aircon and fridge worked fine (though the fridge wasn't cold enough to keep food for long). All in all, we had a good two-night stay here. Around the hotel there were many options to find food, cafes and convenient stores. And the bus stop was just across the hotel. One could easily catch the...