Arin Resort Bodrum — Hotel in Bodrum

This has been a mixed experience so let's break it down BUT let's get one thing clear, Arin Resort is in no way a 5 star resort. I have been to many 5 star resorts; Arin Resort is 3 stars at most with a mix of good and bad:

🟢The good: -Location; the resort is an hour away from the airport, 25 mins away from Marina and about 35mins away from the city. You get a stunning ocean view and the most beautiful sunsets.

-The rooms are cleaned daily and the shower head's pressure is sooo good.

-We got a boat tour from right outside of the resort (towards the back with Ronaldo) and it was so fun.

-We tried the spa and it was so good that I booked another one for tomorrow before I leave haha!

-The decor in the lobby is nice.

-As per Turkey tradition, you'll meet so many stray cats and dogs and I fell in love with them haha!

-You'll meet many incredible people here who came from abroad just like you so it's fun to connect! Most guests are just chill, friendly and here to have a good time.

🟠Mixed: -The rooms are the biggest red flag of why this is not a 5 star hotel. The facilities are very mediocre and feel that they have been built ages ago and we can smell sewers most of the time. The TV is inside this mirror and it makes no sense cause as a TV, it's so dim when you wanna watch something before bed and as a mirror, it really doesn't function (cause it's very dim) when you wanna get ready and put on makeup.

-The pool is pretty small and I feel like the pictures the resort posts makes it look a lot grander than what it actually is. Even the gym is tiiiiiiny.

-Most of the staff do not understand English so it's very hard to communicate. Have a translation app so you can use it.

-Some of the staff just feel like they are always in a bad mood for some reason. I've been to so many resorts in Turkey and apart from a couple of staff members, the majority feel grumpy all the time.

-The AC is functional but is sooo loud.

🔴The bad: -Food is mostly a miss. Breakfast is mostly bland and the omelettes are extremely oily. The lunch snack was the best with flavourful lahmacun and cheese bread. A La Carte was okay, nothing to write home about. So, we went to Salt a few times to compensate for the food (2 mins walk away). Also, one of the times, the garnish on my lahmacun had mud on it and I got a drink from the bar and the glass I was given had a lipstick stain on it (so I was given a used & dirty glass). Also on the first day, I arrived late so I ordered room service which you get charged for. I got the Turkish breakfast. I received only half of the dish and was given the rest in 2 separate deliveries which took 45 minutes total apart from the initial 40 minutes it took to deliver it the first time. Thankfully they refunded this.

-The patisserie also almost always had bad deserts, the tiramisu is so dry and the donuts felt they were defrosted. The donuts were divine and soft only once. The coffee here is terrible.

-The pillows are very uncomfortable. You can ask for more but the new ones were also bad. It's either super flat pillows or super hard pillows.

-Insulation is not the greatest so anytime guests around your room use their bathroom, you will hear that.

So yeah, a 5 star resort would not have many of the issues I have dealt with. Being a 5 star resort has a next level amount of grandness to it that Arin does not fulfil at all. It's not a bad resort but I would not come back again and would rather use my money somewhere else. It's just mediocre and I do wish, in hindsight, that I booked somewhere else.

Edit: I spent the last night here today and there were isolated storms for hours. The electricity in the room kept cutting off then coming back on consecutively and the fire alarm on top of the bed (I assume that's the fire alarm) lit the room twice as if it was short circuiting. Thankfully nothing happened but I assume the power lines here are not well maintained as I come from a country that has electricity problems too but we make sure to maintain this in our house for example, to avoid things like this...

I’ve stayed in many Turkish hotels, but this one was a huge letdown. For the price, there are far better options available.

This hotel should not be rated as 5 stars—3 or 4 stars at most. I’ve had better experiences in lower-rated hotels.

Firstly, the hotel feels unfinished, with renovations clearly not completed. The elevator was creaky and concerning, making me feel uneasy every time I used it. Despite being advertised as an ultra all-inclusive experience, it was far from it. The service was sparse, and the staff were often nowhere to be found. For instance, I went to the pool restaurant half an hour before closing, waited 15 minutes without service, and was then informed that they were no longer serving. To make matters worse, other guests who arrived after me were promptly served. This is inexcusable, especially considering the restaurant isn’t large, so it wasn’t a case of simply being overlooked. I also noticed that staff generally treated local guests better, which added to the overall sense of neglect. It was evident that many of the same staff members were working long hours without breaks, which likely contributed to their fatigue and the early closures.

The overall atmosphere did not resemble a true all-inclusive experience. In a genuine ultra all-inclusive resort, guests typically have the freedom to help themselves to food and drinks. Here, however, everything had to be ordered through staff, clearly a cost-cutting measure designed to limit consumption. This restriction significantly undermined the "ULTRA ALL-INCLUSIVE" concept they advertised. The waffle station on the beach also closed before the scheduled time, leaving us without the promised treats. Additionally, the hotel was much smaller than it appeared in the photos, which was disappointing.

The air conditioning situation was abysmal. My friends’ room had a broken unit, and the air conditioning throughout the hotel didn’t work at all, leaving the entire place stuffy and difficult to breathe in. The pool was much smaller than in the photos, though it was clean. The sea was filthy and hard to enter, and beach service was virtually non-existent. The condition of the pool was also concerning; one set of pool steps was broken and in such disrepair that it was dangerous to use them. I never felt safe entering the water from that side of the pool.

Towels were limited to one per day, and they were so small that they barely covered half of a sunbed—another example of the hotel cutting costs in ways that directly impacted the guest experience. This is particularly frustrating since, in other ultra all-inclusive hotels, guests can usually take as many towels as they need, whenever they want.

Housekeeping was another disappointment, with bed linens that were less than spotless. There was no real entertainment to speak of, and what little there was seemed poorly organized. The entertainment that was provided, aimed mostly at children, ran so late into the evening that it was difficult to relax and unwind. To make matters worse, the repetitive song "Baby Shark" played in a loop, which was hardly entertaining. Even something as simple as getting ayran was inconsistent; I was often told it was unavailable, yet saw others being served moments later, highlighting the selective service that further tarnished the experience. To add to the frustration, the Wi-Fi was unreliable and didn’t work at the beach, with a pitiful 5 Mbps speed in the rooms—completely unacceptable for a resort in 2024.

There were a few positives, albeit very few. The patisserie in the lobby was delightful, and I must commend Mehmet, a waiter in the patisserie, for his exceptional service. Unfortunately, these small positives do not make up for the overwhelmingly negative experience.

In summary, this was one of the few stays in Turkey that I truly regret. The hotel failed to meet even the most basic expectations for the price, and I cannot recommend it. Look elsewhere for a more authentic and enjoyable...

DO NOT BOOK THIS HOTEL - I stayed here in august 2024 - and I finally found the strength to write my terrible impression of this hotel, I've been putting it off until now, but maybe my comment will help someone in choosing a hotel for their vacation. First of all, I would like to mention that I am a travel agent and that I received all the recommendations for the hotel beforehand. This was my first vacation with a baby and the first in two years, we paid more for this trip than usual with the aim of making our vacation perfect. Although I previously announced that I was coming with a small baby, they gave us a room next to the restaurant with a terrace that is half a meter from the full restaurant with 0 privacy and noise until 11 pm every night, so we changed room the second day. Changing the room took more than half a day, we had to ask the receptionists 5 times to prepare everything we needed, in the end we carried things alone from one room to another because no one came to help us for hours. On the third day, when the holiday could start, around noon I got severe poisoning and ended up in the hospital, and the same evening my husband also ended up in the hospital with poisoning. We didn't leave the hotel for the previous 3 days, we only ate hotel food and we got a confirmation that we have food poisoning caused by bacteria. When we reported this to the staff they denied it was a problem with their restaurant. In the next couple of days, we accidentally met at least 10 people with the same problems, the whole hotel was vomited with towels in the corridors, people vomited on the beach. We begged the staff to clean our room so our baby wouldn't get infected, they didn't clean it for a single day, nor the toilet, let alone the terrace. They don't change the bedding, they just tighten it. Every day we had to call them to clean again because in a 5* hotel we don't want to clean the toilet ourselves. Some of the staff are friendly but most of them don't speak english or are rude. They did nothing to make up for our unpleasant experiences. We had such bad poisoning that we couldn't eat anything for 7 days, our entire vacation was ruined. Before leaving, they promised that they would prepare a lunch package for us, of course they let us down and didn't leave us anything, so before breakfast opened, I went to get some pastries so that the child would have something to eat. then I took pictures of what the containers in which they put the food looked like and it was clear to me how we were poisoned, those pictures are attached. I'm sorry that the hotel staff, even though I went to the reception desk every day to complain about objective things, never had the ear to do something nice for us or help us in some way, and every day we had the same negative impression. The evening entertainment for children is the same every day, the children's corner is empty and dirty. The beach is beautiful, but they do not maintain it and do not clean it of seaweed .I would have many more bad things to write about this hotel, but I think this is enough to make you think again if dont want to ruin your vacation like I did. Very small pool, no children pool, hotel before Arin had slides, now there is nothing just construction site. Garden in the middle of building is totally abandoned. The attached pictures are the containers where food is served, the toilet after cleaning, the clean cup in the restaurant, terrace not cleaned even once for 10days and the beach according to Ari standards....