My sister & I stayed at the Aquamare at the beginning of December. Having collected our hire car at the airport, we found the hotel surprisingly hard to find-and this is because the hotel name is not lit at night: how ridiculous!
This typifies the overall attitude at this hotel.Its own information says that it was built & continues to be owned by a family of local builders-and frankly it shows.
The hotel's own blurb positions it as a 4 star "hotel & spa" ; it is neither. The level of decor, of customer care & the food quality places it squarely in the 3 star category in our view.
First impressions were not positive. The receptionists were like robots & there was no concierge or hall porters-no-one to help with our luggage at all.
The hotel was by no means full & we had paid for a 'side' sea view. The room was, sure enough, on the side, but the immediate view was of the hotel next door, a tennis court & acres of concrete, certainly not what I would call a sea view. When I complained & asked for a better room, you would have thought I was asking for the moon. It took ages for the receptionist & then the duty manager to agree to any move at all & then it was extremely graceless-even though the place was half empty. This time our view consisted 80% a bare building plot & 20% a distant sea; certainly not worth paying extra for.
The decor throughout the hotel could be described at best as 'bland' & boring with lots of brown in the bedrooms.The breakfast room looks like a 'Little Chef, with the same type of machine coffee'-but the saving grace is that one can eat outside-although when I had the temerity to move a parasol to give us some shade, I nearly got into very big trouble. The evening dining room is ghastly- a long narrow room with zero ambience and windows at the very far end. It is typical of this hotel that, although the windows overlooked the grounds & sea, the curtains remained firmly closed every evening. The bar, which is at the front of the hotel, was another ambience- free zone & hardly ever had anyone in it-in fact, there was rarely anyone downstairs in the evening at all. This might have been in part because the overwhelming majority of guests were 'seniors'.
The hotel gardens were fine, but the Aquamare is the only hotel along that stretch of beach, which has made no attempt to either make its share of the beach pleasant, or, more seriously, to make the sea easily accessible from the beach-there are large stones & pebbles making it almost impossible to walk in. At the time, this was quite important as the hotel outdoor swimming pool, whilst looking inviting was AWESOMELY FREEZING! We could not manage more than 3 or 4 strokes before feeling we were about to suffer a hear attack; in fact the only person we met who had managed to swim 2 lengths was from Estonia & even she thought it was really cold & never went in again.
Breakfast proved to be the usual 'buffet style' with the usual stuff, but dinner was grim & certainly NOT to a 4 star standard. It was also very 'Eurozone' eg there was an 'Italian Night"-acres of pizza & pasta.
As for the "Spa', how they have the nerve to include this in their descriptor, I do not know & the hotel should certainly NOT be categorised as 'speciality' by Trip Advisor. Firstly the prices are hugely expensive-at cruise ship levels, secondly, although it claims its spa is 'unique', all the other hotels nearby appeared to offer something very similar. Despite photos of beautiful individually designed treatment rooms, there was never any attempt to show us round. We only ever saw a single girl at the spa desk: her sole job appeared to be to hand out towels for the pool-& these were all years old & greyish. We never saw anyone enter the spa for a treatment; in fact it was our view that there was not a single customer all the week we were there.
My only positive about the hotel is that it did appear to cater very well for the wheelchair bound. A number of the rooms were on the ground floor, with level access to the dining room & a lift to the beach.
We did have a great holiday in Cyprus, thanks to our little car & the Paphos port area where the seafood is excellent & the ambience all you could wish for. Our overall impression of Cyprus & the Cypriots was very positive indeed and we may well return-but certainly not to the Aquamare