Leda Beach hotel – Side – Turkey

We booked a holiday package to the Hotel Leda Beach in Turkey on a B&B basis. Arrived at 03:30 in the morning and although reception is open 24 hours, we were greeted by a very unhappy man whose sleep we had obviously interrupted. He took down our details & our passports then tried to sell us air conditioning units for our room at 70 euros. We said we would make our minds up later so he then asked us for 45 TL for a safe which we went for.

Got to our room (No. 219) which was small but adequate for two people and everything in the room was spotlessly clean & fresh smelling. We didn’t know it at that time obviously, but the room overlooked the main thoroughfare to the seafront & the restaurant. The next evening sleep was hit & miss due to the amount of people going backward & forward until 02:00 hrs.

Our first morning, we went to the Theatre Restaurant for our breakfast. The restaurant was very clean & there was a massive range of food available including boiled eggs & fried, salads, cold meats several types of cheese, yoghurt and more. No qualms there until we actually sat down for our meal then we were harrassed by the staff who were trying to sell us A La Carte meals for the evening, continually pushing & pushing for a sale, so we quickly ate our breakfast & went back to our room to try & catch up on some sleep. We did visit the hotel restaurant 5 days into our holiday for an A La Carte meal & it was terrible & expensive so needless to say we never dined at that restaurant again.

The Hotel has a very small private beach that is crammed with about 30 sunbeds. It was mainly taken by Germans & Scandinavians at 08:00 every day so we found another beach about 1/2 mile away which was much better and we used this beach for the remainder of our holiday. The hotel has lush green trees & plants in abundance & is kept very clean throughout and my advice is to get a chalet rather than the beach path rooms that we were in. The chalets are much nicer & quieter.

The Leda Beach caters mainly for German & Scandinavian tourists, British only account for about 10% . This was not an issue for me as I speak fairly good German, but I can foresee there may be an issue for some British as everything is written more or less in German or Scandinavian & the staff also speak very good German but just broken English. There is hardly any entertainment at the hotel & the Turkish night is pretty bland. There are no facilities for children except for the swimming pool and no games to entertain them. The majority of guests were middle aged or elderly, only a few were under 40.

This hotel is completely unsuitable for disabled people with steep steps everywhere & a total no go area for wheelchairs – it would just be impossible to negotiate the steps. The plus side of the Leda Beach is direct access to the beach & the seafront, it being situated amongst spectacular Roman & Greek ruins which literally took my breath away when I saw them on our first morning. Side is a history buff’s dream with almost perfectly preserved ruins & I strongly recommend anyone visiting Turkey to at least spend a day in Side at the old town.

One last thing – we had to be out of room on Friday at 11:00 hrs, even though we weren’t flying until Saturday at 02:00 hrs. The hotel staff just didn’t care and were totally unhelpful so we had to go next door to the Hotel Neptune & pay 45 euros to get a shower & somewhere to keep our luggage, as the Leda Beach has nowhere to store luggage.

I would certainly return to Side, but not the Leda Beach Hotel as their staff let the hotel down badly.