So, the Side Prenses Resort. I won’t write about arrival and departure: the guides’ scare tactics are standard and have been described in previous articles, for example in the article about Club Hotel Belpinar. I’ll only say that we didn’t even plan to go to the meeting with the guide and waste our personal time on all sorts of horror stories and overviews of excursions at unreasonable prices.
Location. It was our third time in Turkey, so we chose the hotel by different criteria. I really wanted a hotel in town, so we could stroll around the town itself. Our choice fell on the Side Prenses Resort, which is located almost in the centre of Side, within walking distance of the sights: the old town, the Temple of Apollo, the ancient theatre and the old castle. You can also take a dolmuş (the local minibus) to the big town of Manavgat. Near the hotel there are various cafés and restaurants where you can spend the evening if you’re tired of the free buffet at the hotel.
Food. For breakfast the dishes are fairly varied, but they repeat every day. There seems to be a choice, but by the end of the holiday you’re tired of it. Drinks — namely coffee — are poured by waiters in one spot, and the coffee isn’t very good. Lunches were up to standard. The meat and fish dishes changed every day, and the sweets and fruit changed from time to time too. For lunch you could also go not to the restaurant but to the bar by the pool or the sea, where they served pizza, salads, burgers, fish and potato sides. Dinner pleased us most. Over 5 days the meat and fish dishes changed completely, and then they started to repeat. For dinner there were usually 4–5 kinds of meat and several kinds of fish; on the first and 6th days they served fried salmon. I also really liked the boiled beef tongue. There was very tasty sea bream, kidneys, beef and more. All in all, a very large choice of food, and everything was very tasty, even though half the tables of dishes were closed… You definitely won’t go hungry. Although I didn’t much like the taste of the meat dishes. Since it was our third time in Turkey and it had always been like that with meat dishes, we thought they simply couldn’t cook meat well. We were very wrong about that — more on this a bit further on in this article. There were quite a lot of desserts; I don’t eat sweets, so I can’t judge them. For fruit there were grapes, melon, watermelon, plums and bananas — maybe I missed or didn’t notice something.
The beach is fairly large; everyone fit in and there were free spots. The sea, like the way into it, is very similar to the Sea of Azov: a very gentle slope, which is convenient for children, not deep, and the water is cloudy because the fine sand gets stirred up by the small waves. The water is very warm — it felt like 30+ degrees (August 2020).
The pool is spacious, with room for everyone to swim; there’s a children’s pool in the middle, a separate children’s pool a little further from the adult pool, an indoor pool and a pool with two slides. The water is clean and smells slightly of chlorine. There are enough places around the pool for everyone.
Entertainment. Well, if you expect entertainment from your holiday, give this hotel a miss. In theory there is entertainment; in practice there isn’t. During the day (not every day) they invite you to aqua aerobics and darts. In the evening there’s either a disco where nobody dances and everyone sits listening to the music or the musicians. The children’s disco consists of 4 songs, repeated every day.
Service. There aren’t enough waiters, and — that’s the impression we got — if you don’t tip them, they stop coming to you and bringing drinks. The bartenders are great guys; they made us laugh, and once they remembered what we drank, they started making our drinks before we even came up. The housekeepers did a great job. In the dining room, the cook at the vegetable station is very stingy: he’ll put down a slice of tomato and look at you as if his eyes are saying, “Maybe that’s enough”…
The hotel’s stinginess. Wi-Fi is only available in the lobby, the bars, by the pool and on the beach. For a hotel that isn’t the cheapest, and a 5-star one at that, I consider not having Wi-Fi in the rooms stingy. The safe also costs extra, which is very strange for a 5-star hotel.
The language barrier. Since most of the guests at this hotel were Europeans, the staff don’t know Russian very well… Many speak a little Russian and try to learn; even when I spoke to them in English, they tried to answer in Russian. The photographer made us laugh: he asked what language we spoke, we replied Russian and English, and he asked, “You must be from Germany.”
Check-in and the room. At the Side Prenses Resort, at check-in they took our temperature, had us fill in COVID-19 questionnaires, gave us the keys and sent us to the room — quickly and with no problems (we arrived at the hotel after 17:00). The room was cleaned thoroughly, every day, without any problems. Once they didn’t leave the mini toiletries. On all the other days everything was in abundance: 1 roll of toilet paper was added every day, and by the end of the holiday we had enough to build a little house. They added 2 bottles of water every day, regardless of whether yesterday’s were still in the minibar, so by the end of the holiday we had about 6 unopened new bottles on top of the minibar and about 4 inside it. There’s also a little box with 2 masks and wipes. There’s a TV with several Russian channels, a kettle, a tea set, coffee and slippers. Our view was of the town, but you could also see the sea from the side.
The hotel grounds consist of a bar, a pool and a stretch of beach. Everything is very well kept, but the grounds aren’t very large.
A bit more about the location, and why we were wrong about tasty meat in Turkey. The hotel is on a slope; there’s a lift by the bar that takes you down a level, and from there it’s 200–300 metres downhill to the sea. A very beautiful promenade. We walked to the old town along the road and came back along the promenade — very hot, but worth it: very beautiful and not too far (about 2 km along the promenade). Across the road from the hotel’s main entrance, about 50 metres away, is the Alya Steak House. We decided to go in and didn’t regret it — we skipped 2 dinners at our hotel because of it. We had 2 kinds of steak at 80 lira each, and they were divine. Any order comes with freshly baked flatbreads, 3 sauces and oil. We also had mushrooms in a pot and very tasty prawns in garlic sauce. That’s where we realised they can cook delicious food — they just don’t do it in hotels. What a pity we found this out so late; it’s quite possible that next time I visit this country I’ll choose a hotel without all-inclusive (without meals). After all, I want to eat well, not a lot. Although I have no complaints about the food at the Side Prenses Resort, either.
All in all, we liked the hotel; apart from the entertainment, it’s simply superb for relaxing.
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