Jason C
Google
Four of us visited Hotel Melian from England for three nights, paying 560 euros a night (per room). Milos is generally pretty overpriced (and in my view overrated) but even so, for this amount of money we were still expecting high standards across the board, not to say a bit of luxury. So the good points first. The location of the hotel is wonderful: it sits on one side of a cove or inlet which is largely unspoiled (as yet) and had a nice bathing platform down on the edge of the water, the shoreline being quite rocky. Another plus was the quality of the food: breakfast, served either on the terrace or on your room balcony, was excellent. The staff - and particularly Sergio the chef - were very nice. So the location and the catering was excellent. But a lot of things didn't - to my mind - remotely live up to the price. A minor complaint, but one which seemed to reflect the wider attitude of the hotel, was bottled water. We arrived during Greece's first June heatwave and it was blisteringly hot: the rocks were literally shimmering in the sun. We immediately asked whether water was provided in the rooms and were told that it wasn't: we'd have to use what was in the minibar, at, of course, the usual extortionate rates. In all of the other Greek hotels we'd been to, you'd at least get a bottle or two of water a day and in some cases (e.g. the nice Nos hotel on Sifnos) the staff took great care to keep everyone well supplied. We then asked whether we could fill our bottles with the tap water, but were told that it was unsuitable for drinking. Later, when we headed out to the supermarket, we discovered that bottled water was 0.35 euros a bottle - we did feel that with the whole island roasting like a furnace, we could at least have had some cold drinkable water laid on in return for e560 a night. That parsimony was reflected in the rooms. The rooms were much smaller than we expected and the double beds were also quite small: again, for the price, we expected spacious comfortable rooms and big double king-size beds with all the usual nice linen and so on. The bathrooms were also pretty small and my wife complained that there was nowhere to put all of her things, which remained in bags on the floor. I also live off tea and enjoy the usual little kettle that you get in almost every hotel: here, there was not kettle and no tea, although there was the usual coffee capsule machine. So generally speaking, if we'd have been paying 180 or 200 euros a night, all of this might all have been OK, but given the stratospheric price, we felt ripped off. On settling the bill, I was asked if I wanted to leave a tip for the staff. I had to think hard about this because the quality-price equation at the hotel was hardly the fault of the staff, who were extremely nice, but having (in my view) grossly overpaid for the quality of the accommodation, I declined to do so, and explained why. I don't know whether Hotel Melian is an outlier on Milos, and there are a lot of other hotels on Milos that are value for money in a way that it isn't, or whether they are all as overpriced as each other (which may be possible). But if I went back to Milos again (and I wouldn't, because it didn't impress me any more than the nicer bits of Andalusia) I'd shop around the AirBnBs rather than get hammered in the same way.
