Apollonion Asterias Resort and Spa

This is going to be a factual and fairly objective review. Positives: Striking architecture, especially the main restaurant and the infinity pool, are very pleasant to look at. Some staff are very nice, smiley and genuinely personable. The pool bar has nice strong iced coffee. Not too busy in the middle of May which makes it easy to find free sun loungers. Neutral: Some staff members never smile, so there are some contrasts to be encountered. The surrounding area is not spectacular, it feels remote and uninspiring. Negative: For a "five star" hotel, it is not by any means a five star experience (some websites rate it four stars probably for that reason, I would rate it 3). There are paper cups in the room, no coffee machines in the rooms and the room service finishes at 9pm with no self-service vending machines anywhere to be found and no shops nearby (their own shop was never open when I checked). The heavy furniture in the rooms sits directly on hard tiled floors without any dampening so you can imagine the noise that moving a chair or a table makes at midnight, probably more than enough noise to wake up people from at least 5 adjacent rooms. Many workers, such as in the smaller pool grill bar, do not speak English so it can be even confusing to ask for something very simple like returning a pool towel, when they can't understand you and it feels awkward. The TV has a very small and completely random selection of channels, for example three Polish music channels and two English news channels, but the majority of other channels will tell you that they're unavailable when you try to select them. One of the cleaners actually used my toilet in the room during cleaning and left it unclean which wasn't really acceptable. Also, the shower handle was broken in the bathroom so the shower head would fall down at me when having the shower. Some windows in the common areas are very dirty - there may be some nice views of the mountains but so what if you cannot see them because of the smudges. And a warning: the steel/glass rails outside around the outer edge of the building I lived in on higher floors are wobbly, they wobble up to 10 degrees, which really feels unsafe and was the most unpleasant experience of all. Imagine leaning against the rail to take a picture of the mountains only to feel it slipping away from you. A final remark is that I was presented with the bill of 90 euros of tax at check out and I understand this is government policy, but the hotel could be more transparent about it. Also it's only that high because it rates itself a five star hotel - if it was a 3 star hotel ( like it in fact appears to be for all objective purposes) then that would be a significantly lower bill as the government taxes guests based on the star rating of their hotel. I would not be coming back despite getting some value for money.