Royal Kostas Apartments - Polichrono - Halkidiki

I stayed at Royal Kostas apartments in Polichrono from 4th May-11th May 2009. Party consisted of me (female 39) & my mum (62). Coach transfer was approximately an hour & a half from Thessaloniki airport. We arrived at the Royal Kostas at approximately 10pm at night. You are dropped off on the main road & then walk up a small slip road to the apartments. Straight away we were greeted & given our room keys & taken to our room. It was very swift getting into our room - did not have the usual delay handing in passports etc.

We stayed in a room that catered for 2 & it was perfectly adequate. Very impressed with the room & cleanliness. Beds quite comfy for abroad & plenty of storage space. Hairdryer on the wall in the bathroom. Towels & sheets changed twice in the week. Maids cleaned every day except Sunday. Arriving late in the evening it was nice to find a 1.5 litre bottle of water in the fridge.

This was a self catering apartment & we ate out for all our meals so it did not matter to us, but I feel the self catering facilities were quite poor. There was an electric kettle & a portable plug in hob with two rings (one middle size ring & one very small ring about 3inches in diameter). A few very basic cooking pans. No microwave & not even a toaster. Air conditioning available at an extra cost - do not know how much as we did not need it at the start of May.

My main gripe was there was no safety deposit box in the room. These were in a separate locked room near the pool. The actual safety deposit boxes were very small - big enough for us for just our passports,tickets, money etc but not big enough if you have camcorders, cameras, psps etc. Cost is 10 euros for a week. Unfortunately you have to go & ask Kostas everytime you want to go in the box & he then opens the room & puts his key & your key in to open the box (it requires both keys to open) & then he stood as close as possible to us as we were putting things watching us. It felt very very intimidating to the point that after a few days we took all of our money out so we would not have to ask him again until the end of the week when we would need our passports & tickets home.

There are two pools directly connected to each other. There is no shallow children is pool. Only 3 parasols around pool whilst we were there, plenty of sunbeds though. There was a sandwich board placed by the pool stating that the only thing allowed in the pool was armbands - no lilos, no balls, nothing. And when a young gentleman jumped in the pool & created a small splash, Kostas was straight onto him saying “No No Friend”.

Menu at the pool bar is extremely limited. No full english breakfasts, no sandwiches. We ordered a burger & chips that was 3 euros. We got a burger without a bun that was stone cold when it arrived to us & a few chips. This was served on a very small side plate. Do not eat at the pool bar.

Staff - Maria was personable enough although her English is not excellent. Alex was nice with better english, & Kostas had terrible english & was a grump! He was the worst thing about our holiday. Beware he will rope you into the bbq quite quickly & get you to pay your money so you ca not back out. He approached us on the 2nd day & we paid our money but by the time Saturday arrived we were dreading it. It was supposed to start at 7.30 but when we looked over the balcony there was nobody there so we stayed in our room as we did not want to be the first there. We went down around 7.45 when a few more were there. The actual bbq started around 8.30. Plently of food but not really a bbq. There were burgers which were ok & pork kebabs with just the smallest pieces of over done meat you ever did see (nothing else on these kebabs). Sausages but these were not cooked on the bbq & were hot dog type sausages. There was chips & greek salad that amazingly was not greek. No olives or feta cheese only lettuce cucumber & tomatoes. Homemade tzatiki & bread. It cost 10euros for this & you could have got something much nicer down by the sea but after the bbq there was a quiz & the only prize was a bottle of wine but saying that it was quite good fun. It was the Thomson rep that asked the questions.