An all-inclusive package to a resort hotel in Antalya can result in more stress than relaxation.
By STEVE LINDEantalya view 224 88(photo credit: Courtesy)
Be warned! That's what travel agents should tell you when you purchase a package deal to a popular resort like Antalya.
But ours, who happens to work for ISSTA in Jerusalem, gave me the impression that you pay for your charter flight and all-inclusive ticket, and then sit back and relax; everything will be taken care of.
Linda and I learned just the opposite: you have to be on your toes most of the time, and even that doesn't help!
Like many of the approximately 300,000 Israeli tourists expected to visit Turkey this year, we purchased a charter ticket to Antalya, the closest destination to Israel. Ours included an Israir return flight and a five-day holiday at a five-star club hotel on the Belek beach called Vera Mare.
The trip, including insurance, cost about $1,200 for the two of us. (We chose the hotel in Belek, incidentally, to be close to friends staying at the luxurious Rixos Premium.)
Our e-ticket instructed us to arrive three hours before the scheduled flight at Terminal 3, which we did, at 1:30 a.m. But the signs were there right from the start that this was not going to be smooth sailing - or flying, for that matter.
At Terminal 3, we were told that the flight left from Terminal 1, which the clerk at information said should have been written on our ticket (but wasn't). And we weren't the only ones taking the infrequent shuttle from Terminal 3 to 1 at the crack of dawn!
At Terminal 1, we were told that our flight would be leaving an hour later than the hour written in our ticket (4:30 a.m.), so now we had a long time to kill.
Well, after passport control, we were shuttled back to Terminal 3 for our flight, and the plane was delayed for almost another hour before we actually left.
We also noticed immediately that the aircraft was actually a Turkish one (certainly not Israir), and the air staff were Turkish as well. That didn't bother me, but the plane was full, there was hardly any leg room, and there was a child behind us crying most of the way.
Antalya is only an hour's flight, though, so we tried to keep focusing on a picture of the beautiful beach awaiting our arrival.
At the airport, we were told to look for a representative from Zen Travel (the irony was not lost on me), which we did - for more than two hours, when he eventually turned up. (We suspect he overslept.)
We considered taking a taxi, but were told this would cost 50 euros. Prices have soared in Turkey since it began using the euro.
In the meantime, I bought a small bottle of cold water at the airport supermarket. (I was so thirsty that I didn't notice the cost, until Linda pointed it out that it was more than NIS 10, double the price in Israel - and this in a country which has no water problems!)
It took another hour to get to the hotel, and by the time we finally arrived, almost 10 hours after leaving Jerusalem, we were exhausted.
After signing in at the front desk, we were issued a bracelet to identify us as guests of the hotel and allow us free entry to its restaurants and bars.
Turns out that our newly-opened hotel is a big hit with German tourists. Most of the staff addressed us in German, and although I have nothing against Germans, it was almost like being at a hotel at the Dead Sea.
It was also quite weird being surrounded by elderly Germans while spending most of my time on the beach reading The Mascot, the true story of a Jewish man who served as a Nazi mascot as a child.
When we tried to sit in a sheltered area a bit further down the beach, away from the crowd, an elderly woman came up to us to inform us that this was "private" property and belonged to adjacent apartment buildings.
We certainly had no intention of participating in the group activities around the hotel pool (ala Club Med) or in the evening, most of which were conducted in German.
Although there were a few Israelis among the approximately 1,000 guests in the huge hotel, we heard no other guests speak English.
The room itself was fine, and the bed was exceptionally comfortable. The TV guide promised Israel's Channel 10 as one of the options, but the only English programs actually available were CNN, Sky, Euronews and Eurosport. It would have been nice to see a movie, and escape the news, but that was not to be.
We discovered after a phone call to reception that the air conditioning works only when the balcony door is shut. Smoking, incidentally, has now been banned in all Turkish hotels.
After a short rest, we finally headed to the beach, and then lined up for lunch. Three meals a day are included, and the food, we soon discovered, was mass produced and pretty much more of the same every day (with leftovers often worked into a new dish the next day).
One thing that shocked me is how awful the coffee tasted (from a machine, which was the only option). I had been looking forward to a good Turkish brand, which you couldn't even buy at the hotel shop.
Although no one actually warns you, you shouldn't drink water from the tap in Turkey, and if Linda hadn't stopped me, I would happily have downed my first vodka and tonic and probably gotten sick ("Order it again, without ice," she said).
The beach was lovely, however, and we were lucky with the balmy weather. (It gets really hot in the summer, and the end of the season is often the best time to go.)
When the time came to have a massage that evening at the spa, I was feeling much better - at least, for a while. When I reserved the treatment in the morning, I had been told that it cost 30 euros for 40 minutes, and yet when I went back in the evening, it had gone up to 40 euros. (How quickly prices go up in these days of financial turmoil!) I had to go back up to the room to get an extra 10 euros, and at a euro a minute, I don't think the massage was worth it.
Mind you, a friend at the Rixos told me he spent 40 euros on sun screen at their hotel shop.
The low point of our holiday came, though, when we tried to visit our friends at their hotel. We were advised at our hotel that the best option was to call a cab, and the driver would wait for us (for several hours, if need be).
We were told it would cost (you guessed it) 40 euros, which is steep for a half-hour drive, but we were looking forward to seeing our friends and their fancy hotel, where only the hoi polloi hang out. The Rixos Premium is billed as a 7-star hotel with a 650-meter stretch of private beach and a massive water park. The Turkish Daily News reports that many world-renowned leaders stay there, including a Saudi prince, the Iraqi vice president and a prominent Israeli businessman.
But I was more interested in the chain itself, which also has a hotel in Bodrum, because it was chosen to host indirect talks between Israel and Syria, as well as a recent meeting between the Turkish prime minister and the Syrian president.
The shock came quickly, at the gate. We arrived at 1:30 p.m. as we had agreed with our friends, who said they would be waiting in the lobby for us.
But the two security guards wouldn't let us in. They insisted they needed our passports (which we hadn't brought), and that depending on how long we were staying, it would cost us to get in.
Despite phone calls to the front desk and someone the guards claimed was the manager, and protests that I was a journalist and one of our friends a travel agent, the two guards stuck to their guns.
They wouldn't even let us go through the gate and into the lobby to tell our friends that we weren't being allowed in. And they refused to contact our friends by phone, saying "How do we know who they are?"
It was a case of pure bureaucracy with no concern for fellow human beings, and there was no beating it. We were left with no choice but to return downhearted to our own hotel with the cabbie (who sympathetically said he would take us back for another 30 euros after we had collected our passports, but by this stage, we had lost interest in visiting the place.)
At our hotel, I was told that they too had a policy of allowing outsiders in only briefly for coffee in the lobby (a good way to put anyone off, I should think), but otherwise it costs 60 euros a day.
And, like the coffee, the experience left us with a bad taste. What ever happened to Turkish hospitality?
It was a fitting end to our trip that after we were picked up by the shuttle in the early morning to be taken to the airport, we ended up spending most of the day in the terminal building because of constant delays in our flight.
(By the way, be careful of duty-free purchases at Antalya Airport: it's expensive - and that includes Turkish delight and coffee.)
The Israelis on the flight after us (which was delayed from 4 p.m. till 2 a.m.) were told they had to pay 10 euros an hour for every hour they stayed on in the hotel.
What I was hoping would be our first-ever flight in which we would leave at the same time as arriving (because of the one-hour time difference between Israel and Turkey) ended up taking the whole day.
When we finally returned from Ben-Gurion Airport to Jerusalem late that night, one primary thought entered my mind: I need a holiday!
The next day, I called my travel agent, and listed all the problems with the trip.
"I don't know why you're so surprised," she said. "It's like that with all charters, not just to Turkey. Everyone knows that."
That made me feel much better.
And she really made me feel like a turkey when I suggested that she should have warned us beforehand.
"Too late now," she said.
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