Laguna Coast Resort, Small Luxury Hotels of the World

This is far and away the strangest luxury hotel we’ve ever stayed in. The good: staff was outstanding, housekeepers and waitstaff were brilliant. The breakfast and dinner were great. The fixtures and fittings in the room were elegant and having a microwave and fridge were handy with kids. The bad: nothing in the design makes any sense. It’s as if the hotel was created for Instagram not for human use. No logical human would design a hotel like this. It must have been an academic feat to create something so illogical. Honestly, I’ve never encountered a more useless hotel design. Nothing makes any sense for human use. It’s mind boggling. Worthy of an award for being so highly curated and so unfit for purpose. There’s no main pool which is a huge miss for a couple of reasons: the winds in summer make the beach somewhat prohibitive some days (and you’re not within walking distance from the beach anyway so you have to drive to it) and the private pools and hydro tubs lack privacy so you’re unlikely to want to use them. Also, the hotel misses an opportunity to create a captive audience for drinks and food by the pool so the choice to forgo a pool makes almost no sense for the hotel, adding to this, they have the maintenance of a pool anyway because of the shallow water areas around the property. There was constantly someone cleaning the unusable/“decorative” water pits around the hotel. The layout of the rooms are a bit odd, they have unnecessary platforming around the bed so if you had a crib you couldn’t have it near the bed. The closets while pretty are not ideal for a hotel, the doors are see through, who wants to see their luggage cluttered up while in bed? There are very few shelves in the room so if you aren’t hanging everything on your bag, you end up partly unpacked or with piles of clothes in places. The showers and toilet rooms are huge without added benefit. The bathroom sink is beautifully large but the soap is only installed on one side of the sink so the second half of the sink is fairly useless for hand washing. The sink size makes it very limiting to keep toiletries and makeup in the bathroom, there just isn’t space. The toliet room is very large without much utility, ie: no sink or shelves. Great to have a kitchen but there are no paper towels so you’re constantly using tissues if you want to wipe something up (like baby bottles in our case). The location of the hotel is at the corner of two major roads so you hear traffic at all hours and one night we heard strange music until midnight from one of the many camper vans parked along that road. We made the mistake of booking a hydro pool room thinking it was a hot tub/climate controlled tub and thought it would be better for a baby if we could warm the water. It was so shallow that a step isn’t required to enter it (and no step is provided, you just kindof slide in like an in-ground bathrobe). My 7 month old could stand with her shoulders above water. It was like a baby bath tub. My husband called it the “bowl”. Our bowl was empty simply from using it once and getting out of the water. They had to come refill the bowl after one use, which was fine because we only used it once, it’s utility was so limiting that there was no point in having access to it but we were bored so we tried to make use of it the one time. The villa pools looked more useable, although they were the ugliest vinyl pools (they may be above ground pools with decking to conceal that they’re not in ground). And we heard multiple people saying they were freezing. Also the balconies all face each other except for some (but not all) of the rooms with pools which have privacy save for the cars driving by. So the balconies are of no use. Essentially you have a room in beautiful Greece where you can’t really use any of the outside space unless you’re fine with people watching you and don’t want a view. We felt like we were in a gilded cage. The parking is limited. There was a frie

This is a very average 4-star hotel at best, definitely not a 5-star property. > The location is inconvenient – there is absolutely nothing nearby, so you need transportation for almost everything. There is no swimming pool, which is disappointing for a hotel in this price range. > When I asked for a simple painkiller, the staff offered to drive me somewhere to get one, but the service was so slow that my headache had already passed by the time anything happened. > The food is honestly not good. There is only one restaurant, and the quality is poor, leaving you with no alternatives. > The room has a full kitchen, which seems completely unnecessary, and there are countless light switches that are so confusing it's almost impossible to figure out what they control. > The staff are polite on the surface, but it feels very artificial. The overall concept seems to be charging premium prices while providing a service that is closer to a 3-star hotel. > The owner has already deleted my previous review, but hopefully someone will read this before being impressed by the hotel's Instagram following. > Unfortunately, this was money wasted. My recommendation is to rent a less expensive villa, hire a car, and spend your time enjoying Naxos' beautiful beaches instead. You'll have a much better experience for the price.