Mitsis Summer Palace

This is a totally honest review, we stayed at Summer palace in July for a week and we have very mixed opinions on different aspects of the hotel. The rooms are of a very good standard, the pools are very nice and clean and the overall location is good. There is unfortunately a lot of things that need improving!! The reception and bar are very tired looking and definitely not 5 star. There is a general lack of toilet facilities all throughout the hotel. The food,especially in the evening was so disappointing! In the main restaurant it was a- la-carte at dinner and evening meal, the food was very bland and obviously warmed up processed food. The service,especially at night, was appalling, on more than one occasion we had literally just got our starters and you turn round and your main meal has arrived. On other occasions the tables turned and you had to wait a ridiculous time between courses. The food served was definitely not 5 star, we’re really not fussy eaters, however the menus were repeated for too long and the food was really poor when it arrived. The bookable restaurants were no better especially regarding service and food quality. In our opinion lunch and evening meal would be so much better if it was a buffet, as it is now it’s definitely not 5 star and hugely let’s the hotel down, the service isn’t great at night either. All in all the food is at best 3 star and needs improving!!! I’ve included a picture of the corn served at the bbq restaurant, it arrived very late, only after complaining, and this is apparently a standard portion size! Like I say we’re really not fussy eaters but the food is a big part of our holiday and it Was so disappointing!

You can reduce most reviews to one question: would you recommend this place to a friend? Sadly the answer for Mitsis Summer Palace is no. For the amount of money this resort costs the service simply isn't good enough. It's a great location with good facilities but time and again the service let it down. I don't have space to give every single example so I'll give three.

On day one I went to the beach bar to order drinks. There was always a long queue - and by long I mean around 10 minutes. When I got to the front I found out why. My order was four drinks, two of which were cokes. I had to repeat it five times. The next day the server from the previous day wasn't there and with two members of staff things sped up a bit. But in the afternoon one of the staff had disappeared and the queue was back. That seemed to be the pattern every day. Two members of staff in the morning; one in the afternoon. Short queues in the morning; long ones in the afternoon.

One evening we booked into the Asian style restaurant but ended up with part of our order being served late. The other part went to a different table by accident. We'd finished our starter before our drinks, which we'd ordered before our food, arrived. And that was despite the second half of the starter arriving so long after the first half that two of the four people on our table had already finished by the time it turned up. When two of our mains didn't turn up at all we ordered more and were then quizzed by the manager on why we were ordering so much food. There was a huge amount of confusion over what constituted a portion, what we'd ordered and what we'd received. I never really found out what had happened. The manager blamed the ordering software, the guest relations rep blamed inexperienced staff. I suspect the latter, as in several other incidents that I don't have time to outline it seemed as though the staff were new and had not been trained properly.

To apologise for the mess at the Asian style restaurant, the guest relations rep booked us into the cook your own barbecue restaurant. It was a late booking (9:15pm) but we were happy to get a space. We ended up actually sitting down at 9:45. I went to ask what the delay was but found the manager already in the middle of an argument with another family who'd booked a table to all sit together but had been told that wasn't going to be possible. By the time we'd ordered and been brought our food to cook it was past 10pm. The hot plate wasn't hot enough and we hadn't been told we could increase the heat. Even when we finally discovered this (from overhearing another table making the same complaint) it was still not hot enough. We ate what we could but the chicken wasn't cooked enough to be safe to eat. I left with my teenage kids at 10:45 still not having eaten what we ordered. Incredibly the waitress asked if we'd like dessert.

I don't think I'm asking for an unreasonable level of service here. But especially if you're going to market yourself as a five star resort you need to do much much better than this.

Fantastic experience, very friendly staff and great food.