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.