Akti Imperial

TL;DR: (Mostly) Lovely hotel, great (and lots of it) food, lovely staff (when not being massively overworked), and great views. BUT avoid at all costs if there is a large conference / convention on. Especially if that convention is Herbalife. Convention Centre and Family Hotel simultaneously is not a good idea. The Akti only reopened this Summer after I believe being closed for 7 years or something like that. They are in the process of cementing a reputation for themselves in an already crowded market of hotels. It is a lovely hotel, with a few caveats, and the all-inclusive plus idea seems to work great. I’ll leave the huge elephant in the room - the Herbalife Convention - to the end. Read about it or not, I’ll leave that choice to you. You may be sick of reading about Herbalife by now. I know I never want to see the word again after I write this. THE HOTEL: is lovely and clean, maybe TOO clean bordering on clinical. It is mostly painted a stark white, with a very official feel to the public areas. The reception, lobby area, and indoor bar all feel VERY businesslike rather than family holiday. Maybe they should consider adding some warmer Mediterranean tones, and a more relaxed layout to things, to make it feel more like a hotel and less like an office building. Walking through the lobby area from the lift in your swimwear and a towel feels VERY out of place as you walk past displays of €200+ watches and jewellery. Apparently you’re supposed to met with drinks while you check in (as witnessed while we waited for our return coach) but we never got this. I’m assuming that was due to the overwhelming presence of the convention people stretching the staff to their physical and emotional limits. However, on the whole AFTER the convention was over it is a lovely place to stay with lovely staff and enough facilities to tempt me back. THE FOOD: I cannot fault. As others have pointed out, the sheer size of the dining area and the choice on offer on the “all buffet” meal times can result in some rather luke warm food. However, we realised very quickly that if you take a bit of a walk - maybe while getting a soft drink or a coffee - and see what’s on offer first you can then get the plate and dig in. Tasty, plentiful, and the desserts were far too tempting. I’d have liked to have seen a few more local type dishes on offer, but being an all-inclusive I guess there’s a lot of waste and they have to err on the side of serving food they know will get eaten and not thrown away. Despite that I was very sad to see that there were many people going down the “load up the plate with was much as I can, doesn’t matter if I leave it I’ve paid for it” route, then doing exactly that. I saw many plates that were still almost full being cleared away by the staff. You can keep going back for another helping guys, they were very good at keeping the stocks replenished. THE ROOM: had a lovely view, and was spacious and comfortable enough. A few more hangers would have been nice, but that’s being picky. The mini bar was included in the all-inclusive and was restocked daily with a bottle of wine, 2 beers, 4 soft drinks, a bottle of water, and supposedly 2 fruit juices. We only ever got 1 juice, but as we rarely drank it we didn’t make an issue of it. I’ll agree with others that the sliding glass doors on the bathrooms aren’t great, and they have a habit of sliding open / closed depending which way your room is oriented. That could cause a few embarrassed moments if you’re staying with non-family. Air conditioning worked well enough, and the shower - despite occasionally partially flooding the wet room design bathroom - was lovely to get under. THE POOL BARS: were great, and always had a variety of food and drink available. We really only ever used the bar and restaurant near the snail pool end of the complex, but found it welcoming and peaceful. Some evenings there were local live bands playing here, and the couple we got to see were very good. It’s a shame that there was absolutely no advertising for these, so unless you heard them from your room you wouldn’t have known they were there. These people deserve promoting to get bums on seats. I agree that paper or soft plastic cups being given out to use poolside is not great for a 5* Hotel. Hard plastic, reusable cups would be much better. Maybe with more of a poolside ‘service’ to remove empty cups back to the bars. THE POOL & FACILITIES: The main pool isn’t very large, and is never more than maybe 4ft deep. It looks large in photos but it is more long and narrow than anything else. On the whole I would definitely stay here again, since when there is no conference on it has the makings of a fantastic holiday destination. Especially if they put a little effort into making it ‘feel’ more like a hotel than an office and working on the entertainment standards. Rating would be 5 if not for the convention. That really did have an effect on my overall opinion of the hotel. ————Herbalife Convention ———— Right then, the big, huge, destructive elephant in the room - the Herbalife Convention. Well, where to begin? We arrived on the Wednesday, halfway through their take over of this otherwise lovely hotel. Immediately on walking in the whole reception was branded Herbalife, so much so you would be forgiven for thinking that was the name of the Hotel since they had much more branded presence than “Akti Imperial” did. There were nothing but Herbalife clothes wearing people milling about, and we were met with signs saying that for the next two nights they would be having a large party that effectively put half, maybe two thirds, of the outside area out of bounds to holidaymakers. Wouldn’t have been so bad, except that once they got bored of ‘their’ parties they wandered over to the one corner of the outside area we were allowed to use and took over that in droves too, pushing everyone else out as they pushed over half a dozen tables together to make one large, rowdy table that also happened to completely block one of the entrances / exits from the poolside bar area. They seemed to like going everywhere in packs of at least 8 or 9, and all getting in all of the lifts at the same time. If you tried to get on a crowded lift then once they realised you weren’t ‘one of them’ they waved their arms “no no no” and manually closed the lift doors in your face. They would barge you out of the way for food, drink, or even just walking around the hotel with never an apology forthcoming. Horrible horrible people. We did however speak to a nice Russian lady who had helped organise the convention, and she was really apologetic and hoped we didn’t think all Russians were like that. She was actually ashamed of the behaviour of a lot of her attendees. She said, quite frankly, that it was a mistake for the hotel to mix the convention and hotel guests and that the convention should have stayed restricted to the convention centre portion of the hotel. As a sidenote, on speaking to someone waiting for a bus one morning it seems this wan’t the only local hotel taken over by, as I started calling it, The Blight. They were everywhere. It just seems the Akti was the one that was being used for the convention, hence in excess of 2500 attending the aforementioned parties. I felt really sorry for the staff. They were overwhelmed, and you could see some of them visibly on the verge of tears some evenings. I didn’t notice the staff numbers decrease once the convention was over, so I assume that the same staff (due to outside attendees coming for the day paying for a daily ‘all-inclusive day pass’), were dealing with in excess of 4000 people coming and going. Once the conference ended, despite the fact a lot of The Blight were still around for a more traditional holiday (although they all still insisted on walking around wearing their Herbalife branded clothing like it was a get-out-of-jail free card or something) you noticed a massive change in the staff. They were happier, talkative, and hell even funny. The hotel at that point became what it SHOULD have been from the beginning of our holiday. I’m sure the hotel owners are aware of the damage this has probably done to their just being earned reputation so early on in the life of this hotel, and I like to think they will learn from all the criticism.

We stayed from September 24 to October 1 so have avoided the Herbalife problems. This is a newly opened hotel in its first year and apart from a few minor problems we loved it. Checkin was very quick and easy. We asked for a second room card which we got without any questions. Our room was on the 7 th floor with sea view. It is most definitely worth the extra money as we enjoyed sitting on our balcony watching the sunset every evening. The room is fairly standard hotel room but has far too much furniture. Large wardrobe with loads of hangers. Free safe (but who thought it was a good idea to put it on the floor. )Great if you are fit and agile not so great for us older holidaymakers. My main concern is the very poorly fitting fire door to room. Huge gap underneath door which required husband to make a draught excluder to block out the light from the corridor. The corridors have strip lighting at ankle level which run the full length of every corridorand remain on 24/7. They are very bright. The doors are fire doors but they are so poorly fitted they do not conform to fire safety standards and would be useless in a real fire. The lifts are an issue and better signage to stairs might help but they probably need to fit additional lifts. It didn't cause us major problems and became a talking point with other hotel guests. Fridge restocked daily. Room was cleaned daily and bedding changed 3 times in our weeks stay. Food in main buffet was plentiful and varied. We found the food to be hot. As with all buffet restaurants you need to work out what to eat before arming yourself with plate. If you take along time to make choices it will be cold as there was so much choice. We tried the Asian restaurant and enjoyed all the courses. Entertainment was very poor. The children's disco was good but on too late involving a lot of overtired children. The best evening was the Greek dancing which was an outside dance troupe. At Oliver's bar a really good music duo played one evening. We stumbled on this by chance as it is not advertised anywhere . Pool area very clean and plenty of sun beds. Beach is rocky but the sea was warm and the beach bar a good addition. If you want a sandy beach the nearest is in Rhodes town There is a bus stop at the front of the hotel but because this hotel is so close to the old town we never managed to get on the bus as they are full by the time they get to this end of Ixia. Taxi is 8 euro from the taxi rank but 13 if callled from reception. We chose this hotel because of its proximity to Rhodes town and we found its location ideal. The staff are very helpful and sorted out a problem we had with the failure of a Tour excursion bus to arrive ( the tour was independently booked and nothing to do with the hotel) and the restaurant staff went out of there way to help with my husbands dietary requirements. If you ask at reception they have a full list of the food dishes at each of the themed restaurants and you can decide if you want to book. This helps if you have particular dietary requirements. The on site shop is excellent and they ladies will get anything you need. The prices were reasonable. If we return to Rhodes we would stay here again.