Hotel Riu Tikida Garden 4*

Super-clean grounds + public spaces, attentive and (mostly) friendly staff, surprisingly good food (I’m personally not a great fan of all-inclusive hotels), and several pools. The only negatives about this place were: 1. No lids on buffet food trays = flies landing on the cold food = 3 of us got a stomach bug. 2. The distance from the old town - i.e. cannot just pop out of the hotel to sit in a cafe. 3. The rather poor evening entertainment. 4. The reception staff, most of whom weren’t particularly friendly. A massive plus is that there’s a no-music, no-entertainment pool area for those who want to relax, as well as a separate pool where the music blares all day.

We have just returned from a week at the Tikida Gardens. Whilst we have had a lovely time, I don’t think it’s somewhere we would return to, however, I know many people do. The hotel is beautiful, the staff are incredible and go above and beyond for the guests. But in my opinion the food and drink lets it down. I expected it to be much better considering it is a Tui Blue hotel. I have been to other 4 star hotels with Tui which were not part of the Tui Blue concept and the food and drink was much better. You definitely won’t starve, but it’s very repetitive. Sometimes we didn’t want a full lunch so it would have been nice to just grab a panini or a sandwich. However, the snack bar is basically leftover breakfast and lunch with a batch of fresh chips. We had a night at the à la carte restaurant which was lovely. Although, like the rest of the hotel, the air con was not working sufficiently so it made the experience less enjoyable. We both had the lamb tagine, which was delicious. It would have been better if it was served with a side of couscous. At other 4 star Tui hotels I’ve stayed at, drinks orders were taken from your sun lounger and brought to you and in the bar it was table service. That wasn’t available here and with 4 pools and only 1 pool bar it was disappointing. I think I just expected more from a Tui Blue hotel given the service we’d received at non Tui Blue hotels. Our room was perfect. We requested a quiet room with a pool view and room 425 delivered just that. The room was hot and the air-con struggled to provide the relief from the heat we would have expected. The ceiling fan helped a little, but this is something that definitely needs upgrading. The cleaners work incredibly hard and nothing is too much trouble for them. We always had clean bedding and towels. When we reported seeing a cockroach in our room, we returned after a morning at the pool to our room having been thoroughly cleaned and smelling of pesticides. We did not see anymore for the duration of our stay. There are plenty of sunbeds, but people are up from 6am reserving them. However, I would often walk past the main pool at 9am and still see sunbeds available. The towel hut opens at 9, but I’m glad we took our own towels too as one wasn’t enough for the length of the sunbeds as they get incredibly hot. The pool guys were happy to help move sunbeds and parasols as needed. Overall we had a lovely stay and met some lovely people and with a few improvements to the food, drink and air con, this place could be incredible and more worthy of the Tui Blue brand.