Palmira Hotel Kusadasi

We arrived late after a long trip and found a young boy asleep in the lobby under a duvet. He woke up to check us in, told us the lift was being repaired, and carried our bags up to the third floor himself. He said breakfast started at 7:30. When we tried to settle down, we found the curtain covered less than half the window, so morning light comes straight in. The bathroom flooded because the drain was terrible. The shower head wouldn't stay in its holder, water temperature was unpredictable, and there was rust everywhere. The door didn't lock properly, with a gap of about 10 miles under it. The floor was disgusting, with other people's hair on it, and the pillows were horrid. Breakfast looked so unappealing that we gave it to a local cat. We were handed coffee in a plastic cup. There were seven other Brits there, and if it weren't for them we would have left. Lunch was nuggets and chips with so-called onion rings. The salad was okay, but it came out without onion or grated carrot at different times. The bread was lovely, but we had to ask about a thousand times for butter, and by then we were starving and the bread was gone. The drinks were awful, so cheap and dry that I got a sore throat worse than a hangover. The pool area was sort of okay, though the grass needed cutting. Looking over to the beach, it seemed like a recycling centre where people had tossed their rubbish, with sharp plastic bits in the sea. Dinner the next night was oily pasta, cold chips, and dry chicken. After waiting what felt like six years for butter again, we saved the chicken for local dogs and walked to a kebab shop. The only things I actually enjoyed eating were probably the hard-boiled egg at breakfast and the odd snack left in the room, which clearly came from the shop across the road. The hotel is miles from anything decent. Stay closer to Izmer.

We had a great stay, and the whole family loved it. The all-inclusive dining was a plus. Okan at reception was brilliant, polite, and always ready to sort things out whenever we had a problem.

They told us it was the end of the season, so the pool bar wasn't operating and the pool was dirty because of the weather. Sorry, but either keep working or close. What we saw was a barely open hotel with terrible food and a bad pool. We didn't even see the room because we decided we wouldn't stay. What we saw was enough. Avoid this place if you want a good time.

The door in our room wouldn't lock, the TV didn't work, there was no Wi-Fi, and the lift was out of order. We also had no fresh drinking water. The staff were just kids and didn't seem to care. Dirty and disgusting, and not worth a star or your money.