Hotel and grounds are beautiful, very clean everywhere (poolside toilets cleaner than most upmarket hotel loo's). The staff are very friendly and helpfull, they seem to like the English! As mentioned in other reviews there really is nothing outside the 3 hotels around the bay, you can wander around the other hotels and see their entertainment or use their facillites but you cant have anything to eat or drink there, so we didn't go further than their shops. The food was very nice always something you could try and plenty of it. Poolside snack bar was popular with my 4 daughters, always serving pizza, pasta, & one other snack.
You must take snorkeling equipment (or buy it there, but be prepared to haggle for every thing!) as the fish and coral are so amazing, and you can enter the sea from the beach just standing knee deep in water you can all sorts of fish we saw several sting rays with blue spots on its so clear.
The down side was the animation team & all entertainment was Italian, which made joining in any activity difficult, they were all very friendly just could'nt speak english, also if you have young children the kids club is out as they also didn't speak english although the hotel managment were very good & offered to show us to the area and said we could stay with our youngest this defeated the object as all the children were also Italian.
A previous review said the split was about 70 / 30 but in reality there were just 16 English the first week & 14 the second week and 8 of those were children! Not quite 70/30 split, more 95 / 5 !
We had a great time and would love to go back but if you want lots of entertainment and cant speak Italian this ones proberly not for you!

Smart hotel building with friendly staff. However during our stay they were doing work around the pools using hand grinding tools which were noisy and caused a lot of dust and inconvenience. The property was about 20% full and the food selection was poor. Entertainment was rubbish unless you were an Italian child! The rooms were small and I am really surprised that this hotel has a 5 star official rating. We have had better accommodation in a 3 star property. I would not recommend this holiday to anyone.

Great hotel, good food, good facilities, lovely staff...couldn't fault anything apart from the immature and incompetent Italian "Animations Team" who were all aged about 20 and having a great paid holiday for themselves.

A fabulous place to relax and do nothing, but be sure thats what you want because there actually is nothing to do, apart from sunbathe and swim.

(We were there 6th-13 Dec 2006)

Philip & Susie

great hotel with lovely egyptian staff. loads of facilities. was absolutely empty when we went (perhaps 40 people in 400 person hotel), which was great. the entertainment team are the only downside, there are about 50 of them, all italian (its mainly an italian/russian hotel) and they arent too useful. anyway, we had a great time and didnt need entertaining anyway. it can get windy some days. if you could get either the iberotel lamaya or coraya which lie either side of it, then they would be perhaps better choices for the same money.
pete