Crystal Aura Beach Resort & Spa - Ultimate All Inclusive

Our stay at Crystal Aura was good but not great.

Facilities:

It has its own private pebble beach, with nice clean swimmable sea, main outdoor pool, outdoor splash park, 7 water slides / flumes (some are children only), indoor pool, sauna, steam room, massage treatments (costs extra), Turkish bath (costs extra), gym (never used!), nurse, on-site shop (with ridiculously overpriced sweets), table tennis table (never used) and children's club (never used).

Like many similar hotels getting a sun lounger in sun or shade near pool or on beach can be challenging.

Food:

Food is available, all inclusive, virtually 24 hours per day. Food although plentiful, was generally lacking quality or taste, forget any idea of seasoning, if you like hot or chilli sauce, bring your own bottle, in fact finding ketchup can be hard, so bring that too.

The main restaurant, the Crystal restaurant, offered a buffet style offering at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's very busy, finding an empty table can be tricky, then picking up your food isn't fun, lots of dishes which don't look great, everyone is trying to grab the recently cooked items. Even these are not great quality. OK at best, but not 5 star luxury.

For lunch you can instead grab a burger from the burger bar, this was possibly the nicest food on site, cooked fresh when you ordered it, albeit the options are limited, beef burger with salad, just beef burger, cheese burger, chicken burger and vegetarian burger. The chicken burger fitted the bun, but the beef burger was smaller than the bun.

Alternatively at lunch you can grab a doner meat kebab, either beef or chicken, from the kebab stand, this was better than food in the Crystal, but not high quality.

There is the quick snack bar by the pool, which offered pizza, chicken nuggets, chips, etc, which was OK, nothing special.

The ice cream stand was good offering flavours including vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, lemon or caramel.

The patisserie under reception offered better quality biscuits, cakes and ice cream, along with a decent coffee and tea selection, plus LEMONade, although no British tea, so remember to bring your own.

Dinner was in the main Crystal buffet restaurant, supplemented by 'the Grill' which offered turkey, meatballs or sea bass, which you would then walk your plate into the main Crystal restaurant. My comments above re the quality remain.

Alternatively, there are 4 a la carte restaurants, a Turkish, a Mexican, a Italian or a seafood restaurant, we were told by reception only one visit would be included, you have to book at 9am for the following evening at guest services. We tried both the Turkish and Mexican ones (albeit we weren't charged for second visit), both offered the starter and desert they provided, plus the choice of three (at Turkish) or four (at Mexican) main courses. Apart from chicken legs on Mexican starter, neither offered tasty seasoned food, it was just so bland.

Alcoholic drinks

The hotel includes all local alcohol in the all inclusive. Queues to get drinks were generally not too long, which was good. You can drink from around 10am to 1am. Beer was just a local lager. Wine was, well, cheap. There was 18 cocktails, or you could order a spirit from the selection they had with a mixer. Some bars do better cocktail/spirit drinks than others, the lobby bar was best, followed by sky bar. Splash bar offered good alcohol portions, but had less choice, whereas the pool bar was just poor. There is a beach bar but that just does beer and soft drinks.

Soft drinks

A range of soft drinks are offered, apparently its coke, fanta and sprite rather than the stuff from Pepsi, albeit I didn't try it. Orange, apple or pineapple juice is offered, but in some places this is crap mix with water, rather than real thing, see my comment above about which bars do decent drinks.

Language barrier.

If you're a native English speaker be aware staff either don't speak English or it's very poor, asking for anything not on a menu is a real challenge. Virtually no guests spoke English during our stay.

The whole resort is nice. BUT. I have 1 relatively big problem. Rooms look good, there isn’t any smell, the air conditioning works good, bathroom looks nice and overall the rooms are nicely maintained. But we have our room next to evening entertainment area and our room isn’t soundproofed at all. It feels like we are in the middle of the show. And for us is really impossible to sleep when outside is some kind of party with really loud music. It isn’t as horrible when the music plays from bar near our room but when the party is right next to our room it’s awful.

4 stars for service is because you will be probably more capable to speak in Russian here than in English, but at the reception you are able to communicate in English normally, so it’s okay.

The hotel should do something with the reception staff - passive agressive most of the time, grey haired man with a ponytail would not bother to look up at me when I approached him and talked to me while doing other things, but the worst part is that upon arrival we were given a room with a huge AC motor attached outside directly over the head of the beds (this was done after we asked for a quiet room because I had my 3 year old son with me, not sure if done on purpose or not) , the entire time it sounded like we were in an airplane, these kinds of rooms should not be rented out (room 2311, avoid it!) ! we asked to change the room for 3 days and were refused with the statement that the hotel is over crowded, my son couldn't sleep well for 3 days until we have had enough and only after being aggressive and persistent were we given a good room, also thank you to Elias at the reception, (the only professional and pleasant to talk to), I wish all their staff were like that. Cleaning is absolutely horrid, the cleaning staff look like teenagers, who yelled and slammed doors during the day, when it was my son's nap time, our floors and bathroom were not cleaned once for our 10 day stay, and the bedsheets were never changed. We left tips for the cleaner a few times but someone would enter the room, take the tip and leave the room as is, so we stopped leaving money. The hotel is severely overbooked, clear that they are trying to earn as much money as possible but that came at the expense of their clients, there were always lines in the restaurant with difficulty to sit, same situation with the sunbeds. I don't think renting a few extra rooms is worth having such bad reviews, we heard a lot of people complain, few had been to the hotel before and said that this year the quality has dropped drastically.
On the plus side - the territory of the hotel is generally nice, green and attended to, the food and drink choice is just great, some of the staff are working very hard and trying their best to be helpful and that was noticeable and appreciated. And despite the mentioned setbacks we did enjoy our time and left feeling relaxed and happy, but we will not come back in the future and will not advise the hotel to our friends.