Sant Alphio Garden Hotel & Spa — Hotel in Giardini-Naxos

Having visited the Sant Alphio Garden already in 2019 we more or less spontaneously decided to spent another vacation here. Reasons for us were more than obvious. The hotel was offering a very friendly staff, a familiar atmosphere, cosy rooms and a cuisine that I consider one of the best in 15 years of travel from New York City to Abu Simbel. The Sant Alphio is family owned, with the senior owner frequently visiting the hotel, taking care of the guest's and hotel's needs. Actually I pretty much appreciate his approach, making sure that the hotel remains a comfortable place for everybody. Rooms and their balconies vary by size and according to your booking. Their interior is mostly classical in design, as is the exterior of the hotel. This means you will find plenty of classical furniture inside and even more statues and architectural ornaments outside here. The hotel's scenery merges elegantly with Mount Etna to the south, giving the hotel a breath-taking look from the lobby and entrance over the surrounding landscape. Hotel and room cleaning was also excellent. Apartment got excellently cleaned and desinfected on a daily base. My thank you still goes here to the lady taking care of room 411 for her excellent services. One of the major highlights of the hotel is it's excellent restaurant. Breakfast follows international standard with bread, cheese, salami, turkey, bacon, eggs and yoghurt. Latte macchiato, Coffee Americano (Black Coffee), Cappuccino, etc. are served as wake up drinks. Dinner is traditional Italian and consists of several dishes. Starting with bread, a pre-dinner will be served, that is followed by main dish and dessert. May be one word to vegans and vegetarian here. Some flexibility is required here, as well as the will and ability to arrange with sea food. The Sant Alphio offers a pool area as well as a hotel beach. The latter can be accessed within a three to five minute walk, depending on one's fitness. The beach and pool area are also quite clean and offer sunbeds that respect 2020's health recommendations (as do all it's facilities). Additionally, the outside loungers are cleaned on a daily base. The hotel also lies close to Giardini Naxos' small Beach Promenade with some restaurants, souvenir shops, fashion stores and a supermarket. The latter can be accessed within ten minutes of walk. As a summary, we can recommend the Sant alphio as a good family hotel that offers a 100 percent guarantee for good food, kind atmosphere and friendly services. So the thing I can say is thank you for 9 awesome days everyone of us enjoyed. See you...

Extremely Disappointing Stay – NOT a Spa Resort!

We recently stayed at Sant Alphio Garden Hotel & Spa in Taormina, Sicily, and I can confidently say this was one of the most misleading and disappointing hotel experiences we’ve ever had.

To start with, calling this place a “spa resort” is a complete joke. There was absolutely nothing about this hotel that resembled a proper spa or resort experience. The rooms didn’t even come with basic amenities like conditioner or body lotion — things you’d expect from a budget motel, let alone a supposed spa hotel. This is while they charged us a lot for our rooms, we could have easily booked much better hotels inside the city at this rate.

The smell throughout the hotel was unbearable — they clearly use some of the cheapest, most toxic-smelling detergents imaginable. It made walking through the halls an unpleasant experience. And that’s not the only thing unpleasant — the staff were incredibly cold and unfriendly. On the rare occasion someone managed a smile, it was so obviously forced it was uncomfortable. When we asked for help with a broken safety box in the room, we were met with hostility and borderline yelling. Totally unacceptable.

While the lobby looks decent, that’s where the charm ends. The rest of the hotel is stuffy, outdated, and poorly designed. There’s no convenience store or mini-market on-site either — so when we needed painkillers, they had absolutely nothing and showed zero effort or intention to help us find a solution.

One of the worst aspects is the location. This hotel is not actually in the beautiful part of Taormina — it’s in a run-down, almost ghetto-like area, surrounded by empty lots and sketchy surroundings. The beach is public, and frankly, awful. It looked polluted, smelled bad, and felt totally unsafe. We ended up driving 30 minutes every day just to reach a decent beach in Taormina proper.

Overall, this place is a disaster on all fronts — poor service, bad smells, misleading marketing, terrible neighborhood, and no actual spa experience to speak of.

Avoid this hotel at all costs. We absolutely do NOT recommend...

First impressions? Reception area and bar area very palatial with limited seating. |My room was quite large but with very little in it; upright chair, dressing table, enough storage space, no info on opening times, room service, etc. - the only thing was a leaflet about the Spa! No tea or coffee making facilities. Bed was very firm but bedside lighting was good.|Bathroom was small but OK; shower head was awful with no adjustment and shower tray very slippy with nothing to hold on to - it took 2 days for a non slip mat to appear! Tiled floor also vey slippy when wet. Toiletries consisted of 2 small bars of soap and 2 small shower/shampoo bottles.|NIce view from the very small balcony but the room had no protection from the sun during the day so it got hot! Air con. was very noisy. |Breakfast had a poor buffet with not much in the way of choices - the only hot food was scrambled egg and this wasn't always very hot! A small array of cakes and pastries was available to finish off your meal. Dinner was four courses and the dishes were delivered to side tables where the waiters doled out the food before bringing it to you. Dining room enormous with waiters struggling to serve all the tables when it was only half full - there were lots of coach parties.|The gardens were very nice and the pool area had a cafe/bar with a large under cover seating area. At the bottom of the gardens was a gate to the lane which led you down to the beach area; the hotel's reserved area (for which you have to pay to use the loungers, etc.) was to the right and the public beach area to the left. The hotel's beach also played loud music all day long.|This hotel could be very nice but at the present time, it has no character and needs someone to sort out the little details that warrant a four...