We were there for the weekend.

General: The hotel is excellent, well designed, very clean, friendly and helpful staff. The food is very good, clean and tasty, eating area is very nice and is kind of a "living space" which also holds a few computers with free Internet access (Also Wifi is for free), some swings, a climbing wall (!) and in general it's very original and
fun to be in.

Kids: The hotel is NOT for kids and doesn't have anything for them. We saw only one kid there during the weekend and he seemed quite bored.

Garden/Pool/Beach: The garden is amazing, the pool is excellent, they have an elevator which takes you down to a tunnel that leads to a beautiful rocky beach (See pics), note that once you go in the water you swim very close to the rocks, and you have 3-4 meters of water to the bottom, and it may get wavy and scary sometimes, but it's beatiful and the water is amazingly clean.

Plan: The hotel has a high tower (We were staying at a high floor) and there's also a 3-storey tower which holds the deluxe room and rotates so the view changes, which is very nice. We recommend on the high building, since it's more quiet (See below - minus).

One BIG MINUS - we took a room with beautiful sea view and garden view (See pics) but during the weekend the hotel has held two events in the garden, 2 nights in a row - a wedding and some graduation party. Both events were extremly noisy between 8pm to midnight, playing very loud turkish music and some speeches, which even closing the windows and putting tv on high volume couldn't block. May be nice if you're a fan of this music but for us it was quite annoying and prevented our opinion on this hotel from being perfect. They also had some laser show during these events, which was projected onto the high building, sometimes lighting our room and our eyes (See pic).
When we called the reception to complain they replied very nicely and politely that they undestand and that the music will stop at midnight, and indeed at exactly midnight it did stop, but till then it really hurt our evening.

Ironicly, the deluxe rooms in the rotating building are much closer to where the events above were held and we can't imagine how loud they must have heard the noise in their rooms. Our room was the middle price range (High tower, full sea view), and the cheapest rooms are without or with partial sea view and are on the back of the hotel, so we guess they didn't have as much noise as we did. Funny, the more you pay the more louder the music from the events is heard in your room.

The hotel is located some distance from the city centre, on the old Lara road. The outside is as pleasant as it looks on the website.


What I disliked

The rooms are postmodern to an extreme. The photos on the website are from the superior class of rooms in the revolving annex. The main hotel has rooms painted, say, fluorescent green on one wall, orange on the wall opposite, but with the ceiling left unpainted grey. One would have throught that they could have at least used white cement, but it would have cost more. The last thing you are likely to see as you fall asleep is the lovely grey cement ceiling in all its imperfections.

The furniture is rough, with a bit of paint daubed on. This is, I believe, supposed to be witty, but if I wanted to holiday in a run-down fisherman's shack, I might have spared myself a lot of expense. The lack of doors on the cupboard was also annoying. I am unsure as to whether the lack of carpeting is a good or a bad thing. Good for the cleaning staff for sure (but it's not as though we're likely to bring sand back with us into the room - the beach, small as it is, is rock). But the tiles were OK, I suppose.

The television was, by today's standards for 5-star hotels, pathetic. A small CRT perched on top of the stand disguising the minibar. Feeble selection of TV channels. No pay TV I could make out.

The bathroom was spotless, and the toiletries average.

As it was not yet full summer, airconditioning around the hotel was limited to certain hours. Got stinking hot during the night, unless you opened the windows, and I'm not that fond of mosquitos. But the reception did, after a couple days and complaints, finally relent and allow airconditioning other than during the regular hours.

The lack of balconies bugged me, but that is my fault: that at least was to be seen on the website.


What I liked

The food was fun. Small, bite-sized open buffet, plenty of variety, pleasant to look at. The food quality, however, was occasionally variable. Service was often slow for drinks. The food hall itself is also fun.

The setting was brilliant. Perched on top of a short cliff, overlooking the bay. The gardens were well-maintained, as was the pool.

The hotel taxis were clean, courteous and not prone to taking the long route to wherever we were supposed to go.

Service was courteous throughout the hotel.


I cut my stay short because, frankly, I can only take so much grey cement. But other than trying to repackage cheap into postmodern and charging for the latter, I really do not have all that many problems with this hotel.

They lost our reservation and they placed us in to a room at 03.00 am instead of 13.00 pm one day before. They made a mistake on their system and they treated us terribly when we arrived. I highly reccomend the Lara Barut but these people in The Marmara ia waiting and prepared to put you in a very bad mood.
I can not believe how they call their self a 5 star. The furniture looks very cheap. Food is terrible. My husband was very sick after dinner and nobody care about the he food poisining he had.
They say they are spouse to look like the saint martins lane or the sanderson hotel but i can promise you that all they look like is a "BED AND BREAKFAST" with rude people and cheap surrandings. Beach is very rocky which makes it impossible to swim, when i go back to Denmark i will let everybody know not to book in this disaster !!!!!! They even charge three times more than everyone else so what is the point?

The hotel has nice well-kept grounds, large pool and a cliff that leads to the sea. Staff was usually friendly, language skills mixed (some German, some English). Room was large, clean, furnishings on the cheap side though (this is supposed to be a 5 star hotel). Beds are large and comfortable.
Prices are horrendous....a glass of freshly squeezed oj (0.2liter) costs 9 YTL (4.50 Euro), a glass of house wine (Turkish wine) costs 12 YTL (6 Euro). Local beer costs 9 YTL. In kiosks around the hotel and then in Antalya proper you will notice prices drop tremendously.
Be prepared to eat dinner outside every night. The week we were there the temps were 42 degrees C during the day. Overwhelming majority of guests were italian, perhaps the hotel caters to them specifically, which woud explain the pricing concept (anyone that has spent time in any of the large italian cities will understand). I also felt sorry for the kids staying here, they were bored out of their skulls. The hotel is not specifically meant for kids.