vilekfn
Google
Hotel Hermitage is built on the nicest part of a beautiful sandy beach. The water is clear and blue and the bay is protected from rougher currents. There are a few jellyfish and a bit of seaweed but nothing compared to other parts of the island. The hotel rooms and buildings climb a small hill and are surrounded by woods and well-tended plant life. ||||Unfortunately, this is the extent of the positive things I have to say about this establishment. We stayed for about a week, during which time the hotel lost electricity over night. It was the only hotel on the beach to lose power and it did not come back on until the evening. Despite being a five star hotel, the staff responded to repeated questions about the power with exasperated shrugs, saying, "The technicians say one more hour." This was repeated so many times it became an inside joke among the guests during our stay. There was also no acknowledgment of the incident or apology from the management or staff. The hotel did not offer any solutions besides offering a single room in a nearby hotel so that people could shower before dinner. During our stay the hotel hosted well over a hundred people, many of them families with young children. Imagine lining up for that shared shower!||||In addition to losing power, our room was one of the many affected by the air conditioning breakdown a few days later. I played phone tag with the front desk for an hour while trying to figure out what was being done to fix the issue before being told that no one was coming to inspect our unit and that technicians were already at work on the main line.||||These two experiences highlight a broader fact about the hotel: namely, the buildings are old, shoddy, and falling apart. The air conditioning units, even when working, are ancient and hardly work. Lots of the detailing in rooms is chipping or worn, which contributes to the general sense of dilapidation. Ants are frequent visitors, as they are encouraged by the room service trays left outside rooms all night (despite repeated calls for someone to pick them up). Wine bottles and glass water bottles are frequently left (by staff?) outside of rooms for days on end and you will often spot them as you traipse from one end of the hotel grounds to the other, trying to find your way through the maze of stairs and stone pathways that sling up and down the hillside.||||The prices are sky-high. 18 euros will get you a cocktail on the beach or at the pool bar. 40 euros will buy you two orders of french fries. A half-liter bottle of water (which is all they offer) will run you 4 euros 50. A full liter will cost you 6. It's important to note that there is very little in the way of other options in terms of food or drink. Room service is generally limited to what is offered by the hotel's main restaurant. There's nowhere to get a newspaper.||||The half-pension option (i.e. breakfast and dinner included) is by no means worth it except, perhaps, for families. The breakfast spread is good but the dinners are somewhat hectic affairs. Servers often forget or omit orders and the food is edible but uninspiring. Another service issue is the state of the poolside bathrooms, which are regularly filthy.||||If you ask the hotel to call you a taxi, they will summon a private driver with whom they have an understanding. These drivers don't have meters and will try to charge 50 euros or more for very short trips. ||||Finally, the bed bugs at Hotel Hermitage are vicious -- and this is the part of our trip that is truly inexcusable. Three of our group suffered repeated bites from bed bugs which we only diagnosed after returning from the hotel (otherwise we would have departed early). We stayed in different rooms and all three suffered the same bites (in all three cases, these were small raised bites in clusters and lines on parts of the body that were not accessible to mosquitoes). ||||Bed bugs are a grave problem for hotels and cannot be discounted easily. Anyone considering a stay at Hotel Hermitage deserves to know about this and I hope the proprietors see this and respond to the issue with the seriousness it deserves.||||This hotel does not deserve to carry five stars. The location is certainly worthy but the customer service, dilapidated buildings, and bed bugs (!!!) point to a hotel in dire need of better management.
