Aquasis De Luxe Resort

We had a lovely evening at the Lalezar A La Carte restaurant, a welcome break from the very busy main restaurant. The timing of our 7pm reservation was perfect to enjoy the sunset view as we settled into our delicious and generous spread of appetisers. Our waiter was very friendly, explained all the dishes and recommended mains and desserts well. He also helped us translate communication with the Turkish family sitting next to us. They kindly offered us a cocktail and some rakı.

It was a lovely evening. The hotel itself is very luxurious. There is food available all day and evening. A wide range of options, although the number of clients seems to limit the quality of the food, compared to for example Privé Bodrum. The sunlounger hogging at the lovely large (but noisy) pool is partly helped by guest relations offering to get us extra sunloungers if we ever can’t get one. It is probably very good for a hotel this size, I just hadn’t appreciated that smaller hotels probably suit our needs better, for the quieter and friendlier feel. And possibly better trained and supervised staff. Overall, still not complaining about this hotel which is very luxurious and has a lot to offer.

We’ve just returned from a family stay at Aquasis with our children aged 10 and 11 and, overall, we had a really enjoyable holiday. If you measure a family holiday by how happy the kids were, this one scores very highly. There are a few things the hotel could improve, but there’s also an awful lot it gets right.

Pools, waterpark and sunbeds

The pool area is enormous and the waterpark was probably the biggest highlight for our kids. At 10 and 11 they were able to take themselves off to the slides for long periods without us and also really enjoyed the splash park. That gave them a bit of independence and gave us the chance to actually relax.

There is definitely a bit of a sunbed-reserving culture, particularly around the main pool. I can understand why families with younger children are keen to secure beds right next to the water so they can keep an eye on them, but it does lead to the usual early-morning towel game. I really wish hotels would enforce a sensible no-reserving policy, as it would remove the need for everyone else to join in.

That said, the sunbed situation really wasn’t as bad as it might initially appear. If you aren’t desperate to be immediately poolside, there were plenty of beds available elsewhere and plenty of shade. We particularly liked the rows under the pergolas near the waterpark. They gave us a comfortable, shaded base while the kids came and went from the slides and pools.

The main pool itself is lovely and absolutely vast.

Rooms

We stayed in a Deluxe Double Room with Sea View in the Main Building on the fourth floor. The sea view was excellent and we were very happy with the room overall. The main beds were comfortable, the bathroom was good and everything was kept clean.

For a family of four, though, space and storage are worth thinking about. We’d seen comments from previous guests about the lack of storage before travelling, so we packed one of the collapsible IKEA hanging shelf organisers that attaches to the wardrobe rail. We were very glad we did – it gave us some much-needed extra storage and made keeping the room organised considerably easier.

The sofa bed is quite small. We just about got away with it for our 10-year-old daughter, but I wouldn’t want to rely on it for a particularly tall or older child. We found a spare duvet in the wardrobe and put that underneath the sheet, which made the sofa bed noticeably more comfortable for her.

The bathroom was clean and worked well. Water pressure occasionally dipped at particularly busy times, presumably when lots of people were showering, but this never lasted very long and wasn’t a significant problem.

The air conditioning worked well enough, although opening the balcony door automatically switched it off and it then needed to be manually switched back on after closing the door. This became a minor annoyance over the course of the week, although I completely appreciate why the hotel has a system to prevent the air conditioning running while balcony doors are open.

Overall, we were very happy with the room. The views from the fourth floor were great, the beds were comfortable and housekeeping kept everything clean. For a family of four, our main advice would simply be to be aware of the limited storage and relatively small sofa bed when packing and choosing your room.

Food

Food was a real strength throughout our stay. There was always plenty of choice in the main buffet and we never struggled to find somewhere to sit. There is lots of outdoor seating too, which we particularly enjoyed at breakfast.

The snack bar was probably the best we’ve experienced at an all-inclusive. There was a really good choice and it made it very easy to have a lighter, more casual lunch by the pool rather than feeling you needed to visit the buffet three times a day.

The patisserie was another highlight and is a really nice extra to have available during the afternoon. The scoop ice cream was genuinely good too. We’ve stayed at all-inclusives before where the ice cream offering has basically been cheap little packaged tubs, whereas this was proper scoop ice cream with a good choice of flavours.

We also tried the Turkish kebab à la carte and really enjoyed it. The food was excellent, the staff were great and the setting overlooking the sea at sunset was lovely.

Drinks

We were very happy with the drinks selection. Efes beer was good and there was also a good range of mocktails which our children enjoyed.

The listed cocktail menu is quite heavily weighted towards the sweet, syrupy type of cocktail, which became a bit tiresome after a while. However, we discovered that the bartenders were quite happy to make cocktails that weren’t actually listed on the menu. I had several espresso martinis during the week – admittedly to varying degrees of quality! – which left me wondering what other standard cocktails they would have been willing to make if we’d asked.

So if the cocktail menu doesn’t immediately appeal, it is definitely worth asking for something else rather than assuming the printed list is all that’s available. They were also happy to adjust drinks and make cocktails stronger if requested.

There is no general poolside drinks service, so you do have to go to the bars yourself and there can be queues. They were rarely terrible, but at busy times you might wait around five minutes for a drink.

Service and staff

This is probably an area where some distinction needs to be made.

Front-of-house service could be inconsistent. Some staff were warm, enthusiastic and very attentive, while occasionally others seemed much less interested. That said, they are working long days in some incredible heat, so a little perspective is probably needed too.

We found that once we started sitting in the same area at breakfast and tipping the waiter who looked after us, the service became noticeably more attentive. We were very happy to tip good service, but it sometimes felt slightly backwards that you received the better service after establishing yourself as someone who tipped rather than simply receiving consistently good service in the first place.

That said, money certainly wasn’t everything. A smile and a “teşekkürler” seemed to go a long way too. Making the effort to thank staff in Turkish was always warmly received, and once you got to know particular members of staff over the course of the week, the interactions became much more personal and friendly.

It would also be very unfair to let the inconsistency of some front-of-house interactions overshadow just how hard the staff at this hotel work.

There is an enormous operation going on in the background. Cleaners, housekeepers, kitchen staff, grounds staff and countless others seem to be constantly working to keep such a large resort functioning. The hotel and grounds were very well maintained and these less visible members of staff deserve a lot of credit.

We were also impressed by how efficiently requests were dealt with. Whenever we contacted reception about something – from asking for extra chairs for our balcony to requesting more tea bags – they contacted housekeeping and it was dealt with promptly. Things didn’t disappear into a black hole or require repeated chasing.

So although the warmth and attentiveness of individual service could sometimes vary, operationally we found the hotel impressively efficient and there were a huge number of hardworking staff.

Entertainment

The entertainment wasn’t really for us. The main entertainment end of the pool can be loud and quite full-on during the day. Plenty of people clearly enjoy that atmosphere, so this is very much personal preference rather than a criticism.

Fortunately, the resort is large enough that you don’t have to be in the middle of it. We based ourselves towards the quieter end of the pool and were perfectly happy there.

Platinum pavilion

We treated ourselves to a Platinum pavilion for one day and this was one of the highlights of the holiday.

Having your own shaded pavilion and loungers right beside the sea for the day felt very special. Food and drinks are brought to you and the Platinum package runs right through into the evening.

Our waiter worked his socks off, although he appeared to be covering the service on his own and this meant things could sometimes be quite slow. That wasn’t a criticism of him at all – if anything, he needed another pair of hands. It did leave us wondering during the daytime whether the Platinum package represented significantly better value than one of the cheaper pavilion packages, particularly when service wasn’t quite as frequent as we had expected.

However, the evening completely made it for us.

We were the only guests using a Platinum pavilion that evening and had our Italian à la carte dinner served privately at a table outside our pavilion while watching the sunset. It felt genuinely exclusive and very special. Having a proper meal served to the four of us beside the sea as the sun went down was a fantastic family experience and one of our favourite memories of the holiday.

As a one-off holiday treat, we were really glad we did it.

Hotel layout

One slightly odd criticism is the layout of the main building.

For such a large and impressive hotel, the route between the pool area and the lobby feels strangely underwhelming. Everyone seems to get funnelled through a relatively small stairwell/two lifts and a rather dingy basement-level section near the restaurant.

There is a huge terrace outside the lobby which seems barely used, and we kept thinking the hotel was missing an opportunity to create a much grander and more pleasant connection between the pool and main building. It’s a minor point, but we noticed it every time we made the journey. For a hotel of this scale, arriving back into the main building from the pool feels oddly like coming in through the back entrance.

Late checkout

On our final day we paid £100 for a late checkout until 6pm. The hotel couldn’t extend our original room, so we packed our cases and a bellboy helped us move to a different ground-floor room for the day.

For us, this was money well spent. It meant we could continue enjoying the resort properly on our final day, then shower and get changed in our own room before our evening collection rather than effectively losing the final afternoon of the holiday.

Obviously this is subject to availability and the price may vary, but if you have a later flight it is definitely worth asking reception about it.

Overall

Aquasis isn’t flawless, but we had a really good holiday.

The food and snack options are excellent, the pools are huge, there is plenty of shade and the waterpark gave our 10- and 11-year-olds enough independence that we actually got some proper relaxation ourselves. The patisserie, good ice cream, drinks selection and à la cartes all added to the experience, while our Platinum pavilion day gave us one of the most memorable evenings of the holiday.

Service could be more consistent and we’d love to see the hotel tackle the sunbed-reserving culture, but neither issue spoiled our stay. Behind the scenes, the sheer number of people working hard to keep a resort of this size clean, maintained, fed and functioning deserves particular praise.

Most importantly, our children absolutely loved it. They spent hours disappearing off together to the water slides and coming back when they wanted food or a drink, while we could actually sit in the shade and relax. At their age, Aquasis worked extremely well for us as a family.

We would happily recommend it, particularly to families with older primary/younger secondary-aged children who are confident enough to enjoy the waterpark independently.