Anemi Hotel Apartments 2010 Personal Review
The good points
- Recently refurbished
- Clean, modern, tidy rooms
- Nice pool area
- Friendly, helpful, English speaking staff
- Central location
The bad points
- Nights can be very, very noisy
- Wifi not free and very expensive
- Beds uncomfortable (but that’s a personal preference)
Noise
I’ll address the noise first because it’s so important. You may have read elsewhere that it can be a noisy hotel and there is good reason why. Directly opposite the hotel is the Loft nightclub. At the weekends, this attracts a lot of custom and is, to put it bluntly, bloody loud.
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| That’s me, Gareth, at the archeological site in Pafos (which was worth a look!) |
We arrived on the Friday of a Cypriot bank holiday weekend and if we hadn’t packed ear plugs we wouldn’t have slept a wink. We were booked into a room on the street side of the hotel. Having heard that the noise can be a problem, we asked if we could be moved at some point to a pool view room (off the street) and the night-receptionist thought it shouldn’t be a problem. Fortunately, she was right and on the Monday we were moved. The Saturday and Sunday nights had been just as loud, compounded by tourists and locals making maximum night time use of the harley-davidson-loud quad bikes available for rent throughout Paphos. Seriously, take ear plugs or your holiday could be ruined by serious sleep deprivation.
Our new pool view room was completely different. We slept soundly without ear plugs for the rest of our stay. I’m not sure if switching to the pool side made the club noise so much quieter or if they just weren’t as loud on the non-bank holiday weekend but it was a vast improvement.
The Anemi hotel
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| The Anemi Hotel Apartments great pool as seen from the veranda of our room! |
The hotel has a crisp, modern look, is light, airy, clean and tidy. The staff are friendly and helpful, quick to recommend places to eat and things to do and were happy to book a car for our return journey to the airport.
The hotel is in a great location. It’s not right in the middle of the heaving tourist zone but only a few minutes walk from it and the beach. There are additional tourist attractions and restaurants in the opposite direction so it really is ideally situated.
If you like walking, you can stroll for miles along the beach path which is a well paved stretch of walk way that’s excellently maintained, has beutiful views over the ocean and suitable for runners too.
The hotel late check out policy is, where possible (i.e. no other guest booked in), to allow you to stay until 6pm for an additional €40. At first I thought €40 seemed a bit steep but they had no problem extending our check out to 8pm for no extra and in retrospect, I think it’s a fair price.
One thing which I had a real problem with was charging for Wifi. This seems such an outdated approach to me with most other hotels I stay in offering Wifi free of charge. To make matters worse the costs were horrendous:
- 30min €2
- 1hr €3
- 2hrs €5
- 4hrs €10
- 8hrs €20
Not good. See the ‘general’ section below for a free solution 
Whilst on a technical subject, they don’t have a printer to use for things like online check in. However, they were happy for me to email the files to the front desk where they printed them out for me.
The rooms
The hotel refurbishment started in 2008 and, assuming the rest of the rooms are in the same condition as ours, they’re in great shape. The furnishings are clean and contemporary with white walls, beech furniture and chocolate brown blinds and curtains. It makes for a very pleasant stay and a welcome refuge to return to at the end of a day out. Air conditioning is powerful although can not be directed so constantly points at the bed (this was true in both rooms we stayed in). This was slightly unfortunate as it can lead to being either too hot or too cold. It wasn’t a significant issue though. I found sleeping under a single sheet with the aircon on was very comfortable.
The beds themselves left a bit to be desired, they were a bit too soft for my liking without the familiar rigidity that I’m come to expect from modern hotel beds. I’ve got memory foam pillows at home and I really didn’t like the hotel pillows. It’s a very personal thing I know but at the hotel I found one too thin and two too fat. I ended up using a rolled up towel.
Eating out
| View Pafos Locations in a larger map |
Although we made good use of the bar we didn’t try the hotel food but there are loads of restaurants within walking distance. Paphos gets a lot of English tourists and offers food targetted almost exclusively towards them. Fish and chips are big on the agenda as are Italian and Indian. I’d recommend asking the advice of the hotel staff or, do what we did, follow the Rough Guide’s advice when looking for somewhere to eat. We tried a couple of touristy places on the off-chance and they were very disappointing. Annoyingly, the Rough Guide directions are severely lacking so I’ve mapped a couple of them opposite. One other we tried and would recommend was Grazie, an Italian restaurant that was good quality and not overly expensive.
General
It seems all the locals (at least the local shop and restaurant owners) speak English so you’ll have no problems getting around.
Many of the local cafes offer free wifi. One that we found, Pingouino, even offer the use of a laptop! Most of the cafes are reasonable value so I’d be happy to pay for a round of drinks to check any net essentials.
Our return flight was cancelled and as a result we were put up in the Louis Imperial Beach Hotel further down the beach for the night. This no doubt once posh 4 star hotel really was awful in comparison to Anemi and really made us appreciate how lucky we’d been when making our choice. To justify that comment, the room was old and tired, the bed was broken, the air conditioning didn’t work and there were mosquitoes in the room (ok, not the hotels fault but it made for a shockingly unpleasant night and we didn’t have any in the Anemi Hotel Apartments).
Hope this was useful! Any questions or comments please be sure to leave them below.
Thanks and happy travels!
Gareth