Me and Penny decided to go away for our 6 month anniversary and get a late deal for the week starting 6th of August. There wasn't a great deal about so we ended up paying around the £500 mark each for a week all inclusive (bags, transfers also)
I had already been to Turkey before but Penny had not, but had shown a strong interest in going so I had suggested we go to where I had already been before, Marmaris.
We were booked into a hotel called Lydia Park, not sure if that's the right spelling but hey ho.
All of this was booked through Icelolly.com and the separate travel agency was called Travelsoon.com.
We were to fly from Gatwick airport as it seemed the best balance between cheap-ness and location, the others being Stansted for alot more money, or Manchester for alot less money but much further, even then, Gatwick was still 2.5 hours drive away from Peterborough.
It was an evening flight set for 9pm
Typical journey down, car parked, and off to the gate we went, after stopping for some dinner in the airport that is.
During check in we were told we hadn't collected our tickets which we were supposed to do, even though no paperwork or messages sent from travel agent even hinted at this. Luckily the lady at the desk let us go fetch them without having to queue up again which would have been a nightmare.
I wouldn't be as bothered about the tickets if I hadn't phoned up Travelsoon.com to ask about tickets the day before, only to get told we didn't need any apart from the email docs we had received. Very bad Travelsoon.com!!
We arrived at Dalaman airport at about 2am, went through the std stuff, visa, passport control, lovely 30deg temps at gone midnight!
We got to transfer bus and headed off to the hotel, quick hour and a half ride while half asleep and we were there.
OMG, is my first thoughts, but not in the good way, from the outside it didn't really look anything like the pictures. Bit dank and dingy to be honest. The room was quite horrific, beds were old and looked like they had seen alot of action (more on this in a moment!) aswell as not being what we had asked for (a double, and ended up with 2 singles and a baby cot.... No, just no....) to add to the manky beds, the sheets on one of the beds looked to have a fairly fresh man juice patch on them, it was definitely this, and no chance of being anything else, the A/C didn't work at all, no fan or anything so the room was a toasty 34 degrees.... :-/ no TV and the bathroom had grimey bits all over too. (see pictures attatched)
As we arrived so late (6am) we were too tired to complain at that moment, but we're going to raise all these issues once we were up at a more sensible time. In the end we didn't sleep at all as it was so horrible, we went to the desk to ask for a new room at 8am, admittedly this was dealt with quickly and the guy on the desk seemed to know that the room we had before was well out of order... Smirking when I said the number :-/
The new room was an improvement but still a bit shit. Again the beds looked a bit well used and cleaning wise was better, but still some random stain patches on the sheets.
At breakfast, we got speaking to other guests, and found they had as horrible rooms as we did, and during a meeting we had booked with a rep (Oz from MTS) he said he may be able to sort out another hotel if any guests weren't happy. In total there was 9 of us wanting a change who had arrived the night before. Myself, penny, a couple of guys, and a family of 5.
We were all offered a place at the Seray Hotel. Again another "3*" place but we were promised it would be better than what we currently had. The extra cost of this was £70 for the week, which only worked out £5 extra per night each. Which I would have happily paid just to get away from the Lydia park.
The new place is so much nicer, more selection of food, nicer pool (at Lydia, you couldn't even see the bottom of it!!) and just generally a much nicer place to be, aswell as being 2 mins from the beach :)
At the time of writing this it's only the 2nd night we are here for (wednesday night) and already I'm happy to say how much better the place is, we went on an excursion to the Turkish baths yesterday and that was fab, sauna, baths, jacuzzi, massage, very nice indeed :)
I'll be writing on trip advisor about the First hotel just as a warning to others. It just had that ominous feeling like during the inbetweeners film :-|
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