Swandor Hotels & Resorts - Kemer

This was my first All Inclusive holiday. I usually tend to travel for city trips and prefer to stay in smaller places, my budget often not reaching more than Hampton by Hilton type of establishments. Clean, quiet, conveniently located, but not totally breaking the bank. However, it had been a busy few months and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I have no comparison, but from what I gather this hotel definitely seems to cater for the All Inclusive crowd well. It does look like the photos and I did enjoy my stay and it definitely made me consider doing this more often, but I did have an issue or few with my stay that despite this don’t make it a definite yes to come again. But again, I am not the target audience for this type of thing anyway. There wasn’t any recent reviews & I read them religiously before my holidays, so the following is quite long and probably mostly for people like me. LOCATION Firstly, the hotel isn’t exactly in what is considered Kemer, but Kiriš, which is about a 10 minute drive away. As it’s an AI holiday, you’re probably not looking to venture out much, but if you are then there’s really nothing much nearby. Just a “shopping street” (if you can call it that) of more of the same local stuff and you can’t walk 5 steps without someone hounding you. There’s a bus service (25 lira) to actual Kemer and it supposedly runs every 20-30 minutes, but we never saw a timetable. From Kemer you can get more transport, including to Antalya. We ended up not using this, but supposedly this one runs less frequently, takes you to the coach station and costs about 75 lira. From the coach station you would then need to get a tram to get to the airport. This is to say that it’s considerably easier to get a taxi which takes about an hour and will set you back around 50 eur, which is reasonable if there’s at least two of you, but kind of steep for a solo traveller. Despite the ******* message, the hotel doesn’t actually appear to provide a transfer service. HOTEL By all accounts the hotel itself is lovely. Definitely recently refurbed and looks exactly like the photos. The area is massive and even without leaving the premises I managed to get my step count over 5000 without even trying. There’s two large pools, waterslides, a private beach as well as a deck on the sea all life guarded, several cafes, almost a 24/7 food service, what appears to be a million staff, nightly entertainment, daily activities, doctors, gym, couple of shops etc. Everything I would image an all inclusive hotel probably should have. Everything is clean, they even wash the walkways at night, glasses and rubbish are picked up regularly etc. You can tell thought has gone into the refurb - a clock tower you can see from everywhere, a little tray for your phone in the bathroom, entering the sea from the pier to avoid rocks etc. Something they have no photos of or fail to advertise is that they actually have a pretty decent gym for a hotel - big, airy and new equi