Colosseo Apartments

The location was perfect, and Flo and the other cleaning lady were the saving grace of a terrible stay. The rooms were clean enough, though the building felt run-down. The other cleaning lady even paid for champagne out of her own pocket to apologize for the room mix-up. I appreciated her gesture, but the owner, Katerina, never apologized or showed her face on the property. My wife and I came to the island for our wedding with a group of 15, split across two apartment bookings: one for 10 people and another for 5. The second booking was made by my mother, Ky Oula, who has also left a review. I had been coordinating with Katerina before we arrived. The rooms listed on Expedia varied in price and size, from studios to one- and two-bedroom apartments. We paid more for larger rooms based on how we planned to accommodate the group. Expedia sent the booking through as 5 rooms for 2 people, but it still acknowledged the room types we’d booked. My messages to the owner before arrival made the arrangement clear. When we arrived, we weren’t given the rooms we booked. We were put into rooms to accommodate 5 groups of 2, which would have meant paying more for larger rooms and getting smaller ones even if we had been only 10 people. Katerina wasn’t there, and there was no reception. She had restaurant wait staff and others handle the check-in. When we pointed out that the rooms were wrong, the staff member didn’t understand, which was natural since she hadn’t been involved in the bookings. She called Katerina, but the owner didn’t speak to us or come over. Instead, she told the wait staff to fix it. All of us, including my uncle, who had recently had knee surgery, were moved with our luggage to different rooms. They got the first move wrong too, so we had to move twice. My uncle then ended up in a room where the air conditioning didn’t work. My mother has stage 4 cancer and had made the other booking. The owner kept pressing her to pay the taxes, which we did, without apologizing for the room mix-up. We acknowledged that the Expedia booking showed 5 rooms for 2 people, but asked for the room types we’d paid for, some of which were 300-400 euro more expensive. Once we were settled, the rooms were okay, but not great. Some showers had mould, there was a hole in my mother’s bedroom door as if someone had punched it, and the water pressure in our room was so poor that we had to take our dishes to another room to wash them. Later, the owner again pressed us to pay the environmental tax, which we did, but she didn’t acknowledge the problems during our wedding week or offer compensation. The owner’s attitude was the most disappointing part. We were really let down by the lack of filotimo, a value I was brought up with and usually experience throughout Greece. Overall, the only positives were the location, Flo and the other cleaner.