Here we go: the post that has taken nearly seven weeks to produce. You’d expect a masterpiece in that amount of time, wouldn’t you? I have to say that criticising things isn’t my blogging forte: the negativity stresses me out. It’s not my vibe, man. I much prefer it when I discover something amazing and I can bound straight into a review like an excitable Labrador puppy, hoping my enthusiasm is contagious, peppering my writing with all of the well-worn overly-positive adjectives I can conjure up. I do very much love to rave about things rather than rant about them. So it’s been a laborious process, trying to sort out my feelings about Ikos Olivia, the luxury all-inclusive resort in Halkidiki, Greece. It’s not that it was bad…it just wasn’t amazing. And I really needed it to be a 10/10 level of amazing. Because it was expensive. Really, really expensive. Let’s get into it: what I expected from my Ikos experience vs what I feel I actually got. Ikos (or I-kost as Rich nicknamed it, ha!) is a luxury resorts brand with properties in Greece and Spain and that offers “unconditional luxury” – think high-end dining and amenities, lush grounds, properly nice wine lists and 24 hour room service. It’s supposed to offer a departure from the traditional All Inclusive experience, with its packed buffets and colour-coded wristbands. This very high-end brand concept is supported by some quite incredible imagery on the resort websites. You can view the Ikos Olivia website first-hand by clicking the link here, but I’ve pulled out some of the main shots that greet you when you scroll down the main page. Impossibly blue sea, empty beach with Instagrammable white-curtained beds, beautiful pool area with sumptuous sun-loungers… Who could resist this? It looks worth every penny, regardless of how many pennies it costs. Frankly, the visuals speak for themselves but couple those with the idea that you don’t need to leave the resort, or think about where to eat, or ever pay a bill, and it sounds like absolute heaven. Seriously, who (and parents of small/small-ish kids especially) wouldn’t give their right arm to land somewhere like this and just have every detail taken care of for the whole entire week? Throw in kids’ club, free bike hire, free pedalo and kayak hire, different restaurants to eat at every day…I was sold. I was also sold because I’d had so many recommendations from trusted friends and social media followers. (In fairness to them, not for this particular Ikos Resort, but we will come back to that.) And I was also sold because on all of the review sites, Ikos Olivia was pretty much close to ratings perfection. 4.9 out of 5 on TripAdvisor! 4.8 out of 5 on Google! I could hardly find anything bad about the place. Something about a faulty ironing board back in the summer of ‘22, perhaps. Slow service at the bar one windy October. Otherwise, reviews were overwhelmingly gushing. And so, gearing myself up for the absolute holiday experience of a lifetime, a true “one off”, I went to the booking site, checked that I could pay in many, many instalments and bunged the sizeable deposit onto my credit card. I cannot tell you the total price for a week because my Mum reads this blog and she will have my guts for garters, but I can tell you that if you booked for the same week in 2026 (end of August) in the same room type (One-Bedroom Bungalow Suite with Balcony & Garden View) with two adults and two kids under twelve, it would cost you… €11,188.70 without flights. That’s €1598 per night. Reader: it was going to be the holiday of a lifetime. I was certain of it. Restful luxury like I’d never before experienced. You know when you see those people on Honeymoon and they post their photos on Instagram and they’re in a hammock on white sands and then they have a little dining table on the beach and people keep bringing them massive shrimps straight from the grill? That was my expectation. Keep this mental image in mind. The holiday in my head was scented with Tom Ford’s Soliel Blanc and fresh passion fruit halves and the soundtrack was the gentle breeze running through the olive trees and the waves lapping on the shore…WAKEY WAKEY IDIOT! Does anything ever turn out the way you expected it to? Here was the view from my sunlounger, which was three rows back from the pool and mere inches from the next guest. It was August and it was rammed. In fairness, it wasn’t as rammed as other places I’ve been to in Greece, in August, but it is this sort of comparison (and I found myself making these comparisons a lot – oh well, at least I can just about GET a sunlounger! In some hotels they run out!) that serves as the fuel for my general sense of disappointment. Because when it’s supposed to be a high-end, “unconditional luxury” experience, should you be having to make any of these commiseratory statements to yourself? For eleven thousand euros you want to have your socks blown off, surely? You want to sink down into one of those upholstered raffia chairs with a well-made G&T and say out loud, “now this is what I call a holiday, Bernard.”And you want Bernard (or whatever your travel companion is called) to just be utterly speechless with the wonder of it all. Let’s see where I think that Ikos Olivia fell a bit short of the mark, in terms of a luxury offering. The twenty-two acre plot was filled to the brim with people all wanting the same kind of unconditional luxury we had signed up for and they were all, excluding none, either at the pool or at the beach. Because what else is there to do at a holiday resort? Are you going to sit inside playing scrabble? No you are not. I know, we booked in the summer holidays – plonkers! – but that’s the only time we can go, because we have kids and kids have to go to school. It makes the holiday almost twice as expensive. A month later, our same holiday would have been €6472. Let’s not bang on about the unfairness of this, it is what it is: the huge irony of it all is that you’re paying twice as much but it’s half as good because they absolutely ram the people in. There were a couple of days when there were no sunloungers left by the pool, the beach was entirely full and they’d even set up weird emergency loungers on the lawn on the way to the beachside restaurant. Oh dear. There’s nothing that screams luxury like being jam-packed in with a million other people. If you’re elbow to elbow and queueing for the buffet then isn’t that experience just like every all-inclusive? If you’re going to go in for that sort of filled-to-capacity malarkey then are you really giving off the air of a luxury resort that suggests it’s a cut above the rest? I’m not so sure. I need to clear up the whole Michelin dining thing, because I was naive and believed this to mean that the restaurants would have Michelin-starred chefs. (God. It’s almost hilarious at this point: I should never be allowed to book a holiday again.) I think the truth of the matter is that Ikos consult with Michelin chefs to devise the menus and then the food is produced in the same way it would be at any large-scale resort. In terms of expectation vs reality, this is quite a significant gap, but possibly my own fault for not reading the website with a more critical eye. There I was thinking that the Greek equivalent of Gordon Ramsay would be heading up the chef’s table. I did enjoy a lot of the food, because I wasn’t having to cook it and, more importantly, I wasn’t having to pay for it. IT WAS ALL FREE!* (*you have absolutely, 100% forget that you’re going to get a huge bill at the end that includes a whacking great proportion for your food and drink to be able to enjoy this level of deluded happiness.) The only downside to the all-inclusive malarkey was that I felt as though I had to eat and drink as much as humanly possible in order to get maximum value for money. Which is why I spent a lot of the evenings low-key tipsy, very slightly inebriated, as though I was micro-dosing, but with alcohol instead of whatever else people tend to micro-dose. Often I had two starters. I always had two desserts. I loved that the all inclusive had no restrictions on it – there were no menu items that required a supplement, the drinks menu was premium and extensive, there were excellent things in the room minibar, you could rock up to any of the bars and order brilliant cocktails and it was ALL FREE** – but bloody hell, I must have consumed at least twice my normal daily food intake and about eighty times the usual alcohol. (** see * above)But despite it being all for free*, none of the food made us desperate to order again. It was…just fine. So much so that by the end of the week we were eating most of our meals in the buffet. And I tell you why this grated, for the price, because Ikos specifically positions itself as a resort brand who have elevated themselves above the “all-inclusive buffet” model. Yet there we were in the very buffet that I had wanted to avoid, because actually it had amazing things like massive platters of Serrano ham, and fresh passion fruit halves (yes! my fantasy holiday come true!) and little shot glasses holding spicy fish ceviche and teeny cubes of avocado. The best food we had in the whole week was actually on the last night at the traditional Greek restaurant (Four Seasons) just down the road from the resort. Ikos have something called “Dine Around” where your meal at local restaurants is included, with wine and drinks and whatnot. We loved the food at Four Seasons, it was really simple, very fresh and just what we would normally order in Greece. I’m not sure what this says about the resort restaurants, but nothing else really seared itself into my memory. Make of that what you will. Again. Was the food bad? No it was not. But it all comes back to expectations and that big old chestnut, the price: is “not bad” good enough when you’re anticipating excellence? We had a “Bungalow Suite with Balcony”. Note to those who think that a bungalow is a single-storey detached residence: the bungalow suites are in blocks of (I think) six, or maybe eight, with three or floor bungalows on the ground floor and three or four bungalows on top. So, neither detached nor single-story. Again, didn’t scream luxury, particularly, but the rooms were light and airy and tastefully decorated. We had the type with a living room, but the living room is actually the kids’ room (with the hardest sofa bed known to mankind) and so essentially you’re all in one big room with a divider. Fine, but it’s worth noting, with your rose-tinted glasses taken off, that you are all sleeping in what is essentially the same room. Do not try to have holiday sex, do not pass go and if you think you’re collecting £200 then HAHAHA. I would have ticked the accommodation off on my clipboard as a solid “pass” had the soundproofing been better; it wasn’t terrible, but equally wasn’t great. (Do you see a theme emerging in this post?) At night I could hear every single person in the block coming back to their room and closing the door – I know that this is what happens in pretty much every single hotel in existence, but I HAD HIGHER EXPECTATIONS OK? HOW HAVE YOU NOT REALISED THIS YET? As I lay awake on the second night, stewing in my own sense of resentment and holiday-booking failure, listening to the people in the room below repeatedly sliding their patio doors open and shut, I did a bit of research on the Ikos Olivia buildings and location. The resort, in Gerakini, had been a very popular and quite significant holiday resort in its previous incarnation in the seventies. You could see the seventies vibe in the buildings and the way they were set out – especially the main high-rise hotel block. Obviously Ikos have done a gargantuan makeover on the place, but it still has an air of the retro holiday camp. I think perhaps because the plot is very flat, and not that large, and unless you’re actually on the beach front (which isn’t that wide) there’s absolutely no scenery to look at. The gardens are nicely landscaped, very lush, but there’s not a lot of it to walk around. We felt a bit hemmed in. (I am trying to be so measured, here, I hope this restraint will be noted and appreciated when I’m assessed in the afterlife.) I forgot to take a picture of the beach and sea, because I was too busy drinking the Spicy Margaritas that they kept bringing to my sun lounger (definite “pro” of the whole holiday!) and then napping with my face pressed into the spine of my paperback book, but it’s safe to say that the website images weren’t hugely accurate. I know that everyone and his uncle doctors pictures of the sea so that it’s more blue, more sparkling, more appetising, but the marketing images very much gave the impression of lots of space to roam about in without having to listen to the business calls being made by the man on the next lounger over. Here’s another picture of the beach: It wasn’t like that. A lot of the time we got the little stretch that was in front of where they parked the jet skis and the boats that towed the inflatables, which were big blow-up drums that people sat in and bounced about in perilously as they sped around on the waves. All very fun, but did it scream luxury? That’s what I ask you! I can tell you that the photo they used of the beach is actually a bit of beach further up, a section reserved for guests who had – wait for this – paid even more money than the other people who had paid lots of money. They were called Deluxe guests. Let’s explore this concept more. As I’ve just mentioned, Deluxe guests at Ikos resorts pay more money to get some upgraded bits and bobs. For my sort of accommodation, in the same week, it would cost around €2040 per night, or €14,286 in total – and for this we would have had the use of a special, exclusive pool and the special person bit on the beach. When I was reading about this Deluxe thing, before booking, I honestly thought to myself, are these people mad? How can you improve on perfection? What possible reason would you have to need MORE than the amazingness that’s on offer as standard? Well. I can tell you, after a Poirot-style snoop around the place, that what you get in Deluxe is pretty much what I honestly expected to get as standard. The pool is serene, loungers widely spaced, landscaping superb, even the style of lounger is upgraded. Sumptuous and deep, as you’d expect when you’re being steeped in Unconditional Luxury. Oh and the pool was virtually empty. Here’s a picture from the website: In real life it really did look like this. And was as empty. Ditto the Deluxe beach: nobody on the white-curtained four-poster beds. Even the special Deluxe rooms were in their own special neighbourhood with more space, more serenity, more sprinklers on the go. This is more like it, I thought, as I pulled my detective’s hat down further over my eyes and tweaked the collar of my trench coat. I’m going to be straight with you: had I known that the Deluxe would be such a different kettle of fish to the non-Deluxe part of the resort, which was stuffed to the gills with prams and people and emergency sunloungers, I would definitely have considered it. But then I’d have looked at the price, laughed, and booked somewhere else. Is this what you should do too, if you’re considering Ikos Olivia? Look. It’s all subjective, isn’t it? I’m not a professional travel reviewer, but I am incredibly well-versed in all sorts of hotels and resorts, both that I’ve paid for and stayed at for free. I spent twelve years as a fashion model staying in some of the best (and worst) places in the world and as a blogger/vlogger/content creator extraordinaire I’ve been put up at some of the swankiest places you can think of. I also like to treat myself to nice stays, but I am an absolute stickler for quality and value: if something is pricey then it had better deliver the goods. So take from that what you will. There are far more rave reviews on Ikos Olivia than there are bad ones. But I’m not saying it’s bad, am I? It’s just that it’s…not incredible. And everything that I’d read online and heard from friends and seen on videos had geared me up for a week that would be simply off the charts in its amazingness. I’m going to finish up with a little summary, because I want to be absolutely fair and I can’t stress enough that there was nothing particularly bad about my Ikos experience. I just think that the elements we loved most could have been procured at a fraction of the price – for us, the mark-up for it being the Ikos brand was not justified. It was a really safe environment so we felt fine letting the kids (they are 8 and 10) go off to the ice cream parlour to get themselves an ice cream, approximately twenty times a day. We loved not having to pay a bill after every meal and that everything was (SHUSH DON’T SPOIL MY FUN) completely free of charge***.(See * above.) The staff were all exemplary. I mean, so very lovely and so professional. The resort was spotless. The cocktails were great and I know because I tested most of them. We liked the free bike hire, despite there being absolutely nowhere to cycle to outside of the resort (it wasn’t the most picturesque part of Greece), because my eight year-old likes to bike everywhere and it was very novel for him to be able to do this without one or more of us screaming “GET IN TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD THERE’S A MASSIVE TRACTOR COMING!” which is what we have to do on bike rides in Somerset. The area (Gerakini) didn’t exactly make us weep with longing to explore and it felt a bit like the resort was this little oasis amongst…not very much at all. We felt a bit hemmed in and, as I mentioned, the pool and beach felt overcrowded. The food was fine, the room was OK, but it stung a lot seeing the holiday I’d imagined we’d have, just over the fence in the Deluxe section. I mean. Come on! It felt vaguely insulting. If you’re promising Unconditional Luxury for all who book, then should this extra level even exist? If the Deluxe is the true Unconditional Luxury then what does everyone else get? Conditional Unconditional Luxury? Which segues nicely into something I said I’d come back to, and that’s the recommendations I’d had from other people. More than a few said that – and I quote – it would be the “best, most relaxing holiday” we’d ever had and that their Ikos holiday had been the best they’d ever had. But I think it’s worth noting that none of them had actually been to Ikos Olivia. Further interrogation revealed that they’d been to Dassia, Odisia and Oceania respectively and another friend had been to the Ikos in Spain. These resorts look a lot larger and more interesting, in terms of landscape and location – one of the resorts in Corfu popped up on my Instagram the other day and the guests were getting a little buggy down to a beachside restaurant and it all looked very like the Ikos of my dreams…Me and my rose-tinted glasses! Ikos Olivia: 7/10
