Danaos Beach

“Great Mid Range Apartment Hotel”

This is small mid range apartment hotel with 27 rooms, set over two blocks. Rooms are a good size with balconies. Twin beds, sofa, kitchenette with; fridge, kettle, single ring, microwave, crockery, cutlery, pots and pans enough for simple meals. I think there are some larger family rooms. Roo… more

This is small mid range apartment hotel with 27 rooms, set over two blocks. Rooms are a good size with balconies. Twin beds, sofa, kitchenette with; fridge, kettle, single ring, microwave, crockery, cutlery, pots and pans enough for simple meals. I think there are some larger family rooms. Rooms have tables and chairs inside and on the balcony. Rooms have curtains and blackout curtains. Bathrooms are simple, but adequate; basin, WC and shower. The basin plug release in one room needed operating from below the sink, it was missing parts, on the second room the sink emptied with the plug in place. Plenty of hot water which never ran out and good shower pressure. Initial soap and shampoo provided. The kitchenette even came with enough coffee, sugar and milk for the first cup of coffee, nice touch. Kitchen sink area comes with tea towel, scourer and washing up liquid, again nice touch. Rooms are serviced daily and linen and towels changed regularly. Towels are not exactly soft and beds are somewhat firm! The hotel provides breakfast for an extra €8, we provided our own, but it looked good. The hotel has its own bar, providing snacks and drinks, pool drinks must be purchased from the bar. There are a few restaurants within walking distance and we used the pizza restaurant next door on arrival and on several further occasions and found it very good and not expensive, large portions! On a Saturday night they have very good live Greek music. There is a good supermarket close by which is well stocked. The very nice new hotel next door is lively and plays nice music in the evening, nothing too loud. Ideally you need a car to explore the area, there is a bus service to Rethimo, we had a car so didn’t use it. Given the distance from either Heraklion and Chaina airports a hire car for a couple of weeks might be less than the taxi rides to and from the airport. Our, not very good, hire car cost €160 for two weeks, booked from the UK (Carjet) well in advance. Flat screen TV with some English channels. Good room safe, extra €2 per day. Air conditioning in every room, but an additional €6 per day. There is a local climate tax of €3 per day in common with all other payments these seem to have to be in cash apparently their credit card machine is permanently broken! Limited car parking on site, which is covered and therefore protects your car from the worst of the sun’s heat, plenty of on street parking in the road. WiFi is poor, some connectivity in some rooms, around the pool and bar it was better, but never good. During our stay the guest were mainly Russian speakers from; Baltic Republics, Belarus and Romanians. Many English speakers, but no British guests that I detected during our stay. We stayed for two weeks but a lot of guests seem to be staying for a week. Nice well kept gardens with sun loungers, umbrellas, seating areas and a BBQ area. This good for families or groups to use, seating with tables and children playing in the garden. Smallish pool well kept, with children area, with sun beds and umbrellas, a deck area between the pool and the beach, with more sun-beds and umbrellas. It is a nice sandy beach, but the entry point has stones and shelves sharply initially, there is a sand bar 50m out. I strongly advise the use of beach shoes to get in and out of the water. There are rocks some 50m to the west, these provide a nice snorkelling spot and have a narrow sandy entry point into the water, good for fin users. Overall these are older buildings that has been very well kept and maintained. Cleaning is very good throughout the hotel and gardens. We changed rooms after two days and for an extra €10 per day had a room facing the sea and pool. We thought this hotel represented very good value for money. We paid a little over £500 for our two weeks in September, plus the extras we paid locally. We only found this hotel through one UK agency, Love holidays. We attempted to contact the hotel directly to secure a better room, but they didn’t respond to; our emails, their contact page on their website nor phone calls made by people we know who live in Crete. The problem seems to be that the manager/owner, speaks little English. We met other people who encountered a similar problem, including one couple who had used the hotel on numerous previous occasions. Highly recommended, would stay here again. Good inexpensive accommodation with all the facilities you could want.

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