Introduction

In Antalya I’m staying at the Doubletree Antalya City Centre, away from the popular tourist resorts along the coastline of the greater Antalya area. The journey from the airport to the hotel is about 25 minues in good traffic – which doesn’t happen very often…

The Hotel

The first thing you notice when you enter the hotel is the strong room perfume in the hotel lobby. It’s quite overpowering and not at all pleasant. It smells like a very cheap men’s aftershave. At a glance, the hotel looks rather nice and still fairly new. It’s only at closer inspection, once you’ve spent some time at the hotel, that you notice something’s off. But I’ll come back to that later.

The Deluxe Room

I’m staying in a Deluxe Room. From the reaction of the guy at reception I gather that the hotel is far from busy because he asks me for my preference for a high or low floor, confirming that rooms are available on all floors.

The room opens into a foyer, where there are two wardrobes with plenty of space to store clothes.

The bedroom is off to the right of the foyer. There is a pullout sofa and a King size bed.

There’s also a good size desk and a credenza in the corner with a boiling kettle, two bottles of still water, tea bags and sachets of Nescafe.

The minibar is empty, though, and there are no glasses. It looks a bit as though they just needed a piece of furniture to fill the space.

Similarly, there are hardly any amenities in bathroom. Instead of the usual Crabtree and Evelyne soap, there is just a no name soap. The the two boxes marked vanity kit and shower cap are empty. And so is the bottle of shower gel mounted on the wall.

There is no bath, but a large walk-in shower. There is no flooding when I shower, but that’s likely because the water pressure is not so good. It also takes over three minutes for the water from the shower head to warm up, but it’s never really hot.

Dining at the Doubletree

There are two restaurants and one café at the Doubletree. The café is open throughout the day and serves hot and cold drinks. One of the two restaurants is on the ground floor. However, this is only open for breakfast.

The breakfast spread is quite extensive. It’s just a shame that it all tastes rather bland and boring, which is quite an achievement, seeing as well prepared Turkish food is lovely and usually packed with spices and flavour. There are two coffeee machines that don’t work because the water tank is empty and the staff can’t be bothered to refill.

The dining area also looks very untidy because used dishes are not removed. As a result, guests sit at full tables with the previous guests’ dishes piled on each other. And it’s not that the staff are busy with other things. They’re just standing around.

The main dining restaurant is up on the roof of the hotel. It’s an enclosed terrace that can be opened up in the summer. The food here is better and the staff are much nicer and quite funny. However, it’s rather off putting that the Turks will smoke literally everywhere, and a lot. As a result, the unpleasant stench of stale cigarette smoke hangs in the air pretty much everywhere you go.

Conclusion

I can’t say I enjoyed my stay at the Doubletree Antalya. I certainly would not recommend staying here. The hotel and room look nice, but when you look just slightly below the surface, the cracks quickly start to show. I think the hotel is quite simply very badly managed.