Esperia City Hotel in Rhodes Town

I’ve been waiting for a suitable time to write a review about this hotel after my vacation:
Me and my family (my parents and my sister) had a 5-day stay in mid September in this hotel and it was a well arranged vacation from months ago since it was supposed to be a nice gathering for the small family. We flied to Rhodes on a monday from Germany and we have booked a family suite. On the arrival there was no problem at the reception, we entered the room, however it was nothing like in the photos which were shown during booking process! Still, we didn’t want to make a big problem out of it, but there was a pretty bad smell in the bathroom, and the bathroom itself was in a very bad condition! None of us could imagine themself taking a shower there, since the shower curtain looked nothing but clean. Also the toilet seat and the sink were too low, hit our head every morning while brushing teeth, and I started to use the toilet in lobby when needed! Apart of these, the air conditioner in me and my sister’s room was not working, because the balcony door was not closing properly, and you can imagine its not possible in that heat to spend even a minute without ac. So I went to the reception and told them about the situation and they offered us another room in first level, which also had other problems… At the end they told us the door can be fixed earliest tomorrow because an exterior maintenance guy is needed. So you can already imagine the shock we had after spending hours to fly there, after all the arrangements…
The day after we went to our first breakfast, and I felt embarrased to my parents: the athmosphere was pretty bad, the selection of food was bad and they were low quality!! Imagine you’re coming to Greece for summer vacation and there is even no cheese in breakfast, and the olive oil is in small glass and you cant take it to your table. There were like 3-4 olive oil boxes (spray bottle) in buffet and we took one to our table during breakfast and then the waiter with a very rude, aggressive face came to our table and took it saying that its not allowed!! Probably it was told to the waiter to do so by the hotel manager Apostolis I guess who was sitting at a table next to ours! You can’t make people pay loads of money for their well-earned vacation and then everyday sit in the breakfast lounge and watch them eating and count their bites, what kind of hotel management is that?! Also after couple of days when my mother wanted to move to outside to have breakfast because a table was free, he came and said that she has to leave the already filled plate inside, because appereantly inside and outside areas have a certain number of plates! Also before I forget, one more shock we had in a open buffet: there is one plate per person on each table, and you can’t get any more plates from the buffet! Once I asked the waitress and she said you have one plate on your table and thats for everything!
I very much regret booking this hotel, and the only reason I’m writing this review is to prevent people going through similar uglinesses we went through! I wish someone wrote such honest review so that I could read it before booking and stay away from this place…

I went on holiday through a travel agency in Rhodes and we stayed at Esperia City Hotel. Unfortunately, our flight was delayed and we arrived in Rhodes around 2 AM. We went to the reception to check in, and there we had the unpleasant surprise of being given a completely different room from the one we had booked – a room that cannot be found on any website of Esperia Hotel. I should mention that the hotel is split into two parts: the new building and the old one “from our great-grandparents’ time”, where we had the misfortune to be placed. Online, you can only find pictures of the new building.

I want to point out that for the room we booked, the travel agency even emailed the hotel to check if it was available during our dates, and the hotel confirmed it was. After seeing the room, I told the receptionist that it was not what we had reserved and asked to either change our room or get a refund. Neither option was possible, as she told us there was nothing she could do and that we had to wait until the manager came in the morning. This meant we were forced to either stay in that (horrible) room full of mold, which looked like it was from centuries ago and worth at most €200, or spend the night in the reception.

After two hours of discussions at reception, with no solution, we had no choice but to stay in that dreadful room. The bed we “slept” in (for at most one hour, since it was impossible to actually fall asleep in that filth) was made of cement and didn’t even have a pillow.

The next day, the representative of our travel agency came to help sort out the situation, as well as the manager, who offered us another apartment – basically the same but slightly larger. He told us nonchalantly that we should be satisfied with that, because there was no other option. We refused and asked for our money back. After lengthy discussions, the manager finally said that they had found two separate rooms – even though we had originally booked one apartment. We accepted these two rooms in the new building, as it was the best option at the time.

Most likely, the tourists who were supposed to stay in those two rooms went through the exact same thing as us – pushed into the old building. The hotel’s excuse was that they had made an overbooking and couldn’t do anything about it. Probably, if we hadn’t booked through a travel agency, no one would have paid attention to us and we would have been forced to accept that miserable apartment.

Of course, we didn’t get a refund for the lost night, nor any kind of compensation.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS HOTEL!

I am also attaching pictures of what we booked versus what we actually received.