The Grecotel Eva Palace counts a scenic setting, a palm-fringed pool, and a couples-focused spa among its best bits.
This place is set on an exclusive, pine-cloaked peninsula. It’s spread out across lots of levels, connected by rustic stepped pathways and well-tended lawns, which lead down to a secluded sand-and-shingle cove.
The hotel’s interiors team classic whitewashed walls with furniture in shades of cream and magnolia. Rooms have the same colour scheme, and feature 4-poster canopy beds.
For breakfast and dinner with an open-air veranda to make the most of the views whilst dining on the international cuisine, which includes vegetarian and healthy options.
Tuck into the buffet spread at lunchtime. Come evening there's an à la carte menu to choose from. You can enjoy lunch here as often as you like, and 1 visit per stay is included for dinner.
Sophisticated styling and calm colours are the essence of these bungalow rooms. Situated in the hotel gardens, large doors bring in natural light to the room - from your balcony you'll also have views out over the gardens and limited sea views. There's also extras such as a mini Hi-Fi, bathrobes and safety deposit box.
These superior bungalow rooms come with a balcony leading off from the bedroom area and you'll have views out over the gardens and sea. There's also extras such as a fridge, a TV, bathrobes and safety deposit box.
Stay in Kommeno Bay
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Grecotel is a money-hungry company. I reserved a room for June and today the borders of Greece are closed and in Europe travel is prohibited and there are no flights available. I requested reimbursement for this room as I have no way of getting to Greece but this hotel considers that it can keep the money without providing the service. So this is a hotel that should be avoided at all costs because of their greedy and dishonest behavior.More
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laakk,
5 star luxury hotel
I love this hotel, the staff are very friendly and always smiling. The pool is really nice and it has it's own private beach. You can book boat trips that go direct from this beach. The rooms are wonderful with everything you need including a fridge and a safe, the air conditioning works very well and is very quiet. Your room is cleaned every day. I have been here for my last few holidays and am booked again for this year. More
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glenw665, 187053
Not up to 5* standards and to be avoided if you are a vegetarian
The hotel isn't five star - a pretty average four star with a nice pool.
Room
Superficially attractive but not luxurious (that applies to a lot of the common areas too). The bathroom seems to have undergone some refurbishment but this has resulted in a disparity between the renewed elements and the older stuff, plus there are great gobbets of grout and silicon where fittings have been replaced. We were somewhat bemused by the large wardrobes which came with about ten hangers! We asked for more which we received but they did seem rather surprised and dumbfounded. The wardrobe area has a couple of tiny drawers with the safe on a shelf above, another high shelf and at the other end some shallow shelving (not even deep enough for my size 3 shoes). There is also a luggage rack with some shallow drawers underneath.
When we arrived there was a floor standing lamp on one side of the bed but nothing on the other, and no switch to operate any of the overhead lights. We asked for another lamp so I didn't have to try and navigate around the bed in the dark. The balcony in our supposedly superior panoramic view room was a disappointment. Be aware that whilst the images on line show a balcony with railings, our balcony had a three foot high masonry wall - whilst sitting down you didn't have much of a view. It seemed that only the rooms on floor 7 were guaranteed to have the railing. On our floor and, I think the floor above, only the two end rooms on either side of the wing had that sort of balcony. Standing up, the view was lovely (if you ignored the Grecotel Imperial block straight ahead!) with Corfu town across the bay in the distance on one side, the Albanian coast opposite and the north eastern chunk of the island from Barbati round to Kalami on the other side.
Storage in the bathroom was pitifully poor. There are wall-mounted twin basins with an area for toiletries but this is wholly occupied on one basin by the tray of hotel toiletries. Two hand towels were provided but there is only one towel ring mounted on the wall at the far end. There is also a small wheeled trolley with two shelves (although again one of these is largely taken up by the usual box of tissues). The toiletries themselves, branded Grecotel, were nice and included hair conditioner which is often not available. Bath robes were provided - both were tiny sizes (not suitable for a man) and the towelling had seen better days. The towels varied from dazzling white to old hard grey white. The hairdryer is wall-mounted in the bathroom too - reasonably powerful but one of those where you have to keep pressing on the button to keep it going - only a man would choose these contraptions which hamper styling your hair!
The room had an armchair but the fabric on this was worn and stained especially around the arms and the skirt. The balcony wicker chairs looked to be fairly new and were both comfortable and clean.
Housekeeping were very good.
I would be very wary of staying in the bungalows because they seem to have no view. We even saw some junior suites whose only view was over the table tennis area right in front of them.
Internet access was sloooooowww.
Public areas
The pool area is, without question, fantastic although come down too late, even in mid-September, and you will struggle to find a free lounger. You'll find plenty of loungers reserved with towels but no bodies. Some people were reserving loungers on one side of the pool whilst sitting on loungers on the other side. One couple even reserved their loungers the night before by leaving a beach bag and towels at their favoured spot. No-one even attempts to control this.
Below the pool and just behind the beach there are more loungers shaded by trees, plus of course more again on the beach although these seemed to be taken more often than not.
Some parts of the public areas, notably the toilets, and the bar furniture in Serenissima have seen better days - I have seen better in two star hotels. The sofa skirts and arms were badly stained.
Bars
We used the pool bar only during the day, occasionally used the beach bar, and spent most evenings in the bar in the main building where we found the staff to be warm and friendly - thanks to the two Marias, Ekaterina, Veronika, Yanni and another young man who served us regularly and remembered our drinks (he may have be another Yanni but shamefully I have forgotten his name). Staff at the pool bar were a more mixed bunch - some who didn't seem to want to be there, others very friendly, meanwhile Magda held sway at the beach bar.
We were on PP. The drinks included in the package sometimes seemed a bizarre selection. Most, if not all, of the virgin cocktails were excluded, margeritas were included as long as you didn't want a strawberry margerita. The only whisky on the package was Johnny Walker Red label, the brandies were all Greek, vodka was mainly Absolut. No Baileys on the plan but a perfectly acceptable alternative was available.
Food
Now we come to the bad part. I have been a vegetarian for more than forty years, and Eva Palace has been the worst experience in terms of food that I have had to endure in the last thirty years. I can still remember the bad old days when the reaction to vegetarianism was either an omelette or a bowl of spaghetti & tomato sauce. Thirty years or so ago things changed for the better, with menus providing vegetarian options as a matter of course. Unfortunately Eva Palace is still living in the dark days.
I had a meltdown on day 3 - I came into lunch and, because nothing is labelled, asked what was suitable for vegetarians. The young lady pointed at a dish of by now grey green French beans in tomato sauce, quite clearly a vegetable accompaniment to the meat dishes on offer. The previous evening's vegetarian options had been more side dishes - a slice of unadorned grilled aubergine and zucchini fritters. There had been a number of dishes that could have been easily adapted for vegetarians - I am not suggesting that meat should have been removed from them all but surely leaving one or two meat-free would have been a good idea. That morning at breakfast we were too late for the egg station and the scrambled eggs on the buffet, sitting next to a pile of bacon, contained ham! (As an aside, there is no freshly squeezed juice a breakfast , just some awful concoction that is either watered down juice from concentrate or made up from powdered formula.) Grey green beans at lunchtime just sent me over the edge. One of the members of staff, Alvina, got the message - although the GM denied that she had changed anything - and at lunch pointed out the veg options which did improve. Dinner improved for a day or so and then reverted to the norm (my main course on one meal was a plate of rosemary chips) at which point I went to see the GM, although much good did it do.
The upshot of that conversation was that I wasn't helping because I didn't tell them each evening what I wanted to eat (so it is the guest's fault that the hotel hasn't the imagination to cater for vegetarians despite there being a conservative 40m of them in Europe!) This approach apparently had "served us well" for many years. I daresay it has served the hotel well - they didn't have to bother themselves - but it didn't and doesn't serve the customer well. I pointed out to him, as I had to others, that it would a simple thing to ensure that there was at least one vegetarian dish each evening and that it would be simple to put into effect e.g. leave the ham or fish out of the risotto, or if you are offering a meat lasagna then leave meat out of the stuffed vegetables. It isn't rocket science. I was told however that changing the buffet was not possible in a short time. I could understand this if I had been asking them to add things that they didn't routinely have in stock but how hard is it to leave something out? It was a mindset that I haven't come across in thirty years. At one point someone suggested I share with them my favourite veggie recipes - maybe I should have shipped the chef a few of my cookery books in advance. I can only conclude the kitchen staff are not skilled chefs but mass caterers, only I haven't come across a canteen this poor in many, many years.
Ironically, the many wonderful Greek vegetarian dishes just didn't appear on the menu although I found the lovely Greek leek & cheese pie at breakfast on my final day - not what I would want at breakfast time but it would have made a lovely dinner with all those veg accompaniments! On our last day I overhead a couple at the lunch buffet say 'It looks like it's salad & chips again'. Maybe I should have suggested that they bring foil to breakfast, wrap the leek pie and get the staff to microwave it later for dinner!
By day 8 I had given up on expecting anything decent for dinner and started to treat it as a joke, albeit I was paying for this joke. The best food I ate the whole fortnight was the plate of saganaki in a beachside taverna at Kalami which offered several options suitable for vegetarians.
One rather worrying thing is that I asked a member of staff whether a dish close to the crudites was hummus (like virtually everything else there was no adequate label) - she indicated it was. It turned out to be taramasalata - just as well I don't have an allergy to fish but rather worrying for anyone who does, and it suggests a somewhat cavalier attitude and/or lack of training about common allergens, something mandated by EU law.
My husband, a confirmed carnivore, thought the food no more than OK. The biggest problem was that food was generally not hot. It varied from lukewarm to cold to stone cold. I recall getting excited when there was a mushroom risotto one day at lunch in the outside kitchen - unfortunately it was stone cold and cold congealed risotto is not an appetising dish. The meat dishes were often cold too. One thing guaranteed to be hot were the marvellous rosemary chips but that's not exactly a meal.
Breakfast and the dinner buffet are served in the restaurant in the main building - the internal part reminded me of a staff canteen albeit the food in my canteen is better. We didn't try the other restaurants. The Steak & Sushi place does offer alternatives to steak and sushi - lamb, chicken or pork, nothing vegetarian, of course! The menu at La Contessa only ever seemed to be published just before it opened and when we saw it there was nothing for me.
I am sure the GM will trot out his usual comment about how criticisms will help them improve - don't believe it.
Other
Yes - there are wasps, as there are all over the island. The Eva Palace does not attempt to control them though we did see wasp traps at the Imperial. Use repellent.
Steps - yes the hotel is on a slope and the steps will be an impediment to someone who is disabled or is unsteady on their feet, however it wasn't s bad as we expected - two fairly steep flights like stairs in a house and then a flight of wider, deeper & shallower steps descending a similar height as a flight of house stairs.
Free parking is available and having a car is a benefit as there isn't much in the vicinity. It is a fair walk to the bus stop with stretches without pavement. There is a free shuttle to Corfu town departing at 10am and returning at 2pm. You can also book a return trip by boat for a modest cost as long as there are enough other people to share (otherwise the price is around €200).More
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andmar, 186395
Don’t belong to 5stars hotel
We stayed at this hotel in July two weeks. The room we stayed was very old, not clean, the curtains with holes, ugly furnitures, the bathroom also was very old and dirty. The staff at reception was not polite and didn’t explain about the hotel’s service. But not everything was bad there. The staff at main restaurant and pool bar was helpful, polite en friendly. The hotel has a private beach and beautiful nature around. We enjoyed the pool and it’s comfortable sunbeds. More
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192nargisr, 188636
Great all inclusive hotel
Wonderful hotel based in the Kommeno Bay area of Corfu. Large balcony rooms well worth the extra with great views of the sea from two different bays. The hotel is well appointed and the rooms are comfortable. The food and drink is first class, with premium plus worth having for a full drinks menu. The staff are great, very friendly and really helpful. The pool area is large and well stocked with loungers and the only downside is the pool bar and lunch restaurant is at the pool, which is down a large flight of steps. Otherwise this hotel is great and we would love to visit again.More
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