If you are a family with young children, have no problem with wall-to-ceiling noise for most of the day and have no interest in good food, this is the place for you. If not, our best advice is consider an alternative. We went to the Acacia for a week at the beginning of July hoping for rest, relaxation, good food and sight seeing. We came home two days early having achieved none of these.
The hotel is about 1.5 hours drive by car from Palermo airport, and probably 3 hours from Catania. The nearest town, Cefalu, is 10 miles away.
On the plus side, the hotel itself is lovely. It’s well-designed and low-rise with lots of greenery, ponds and plants. It’s only about a year old, spotlessly clean, with pleasant, well-furnished (though quite small) rooms with excellent, very efficient air conditioning that the guest can control. The rooms had balconies, a big and easy to use safe and a flat screen TV. The shower was quite good (although it was difficult to keep the water temperature constant) and there is a hair dryer. Rooms facing the sea would have a lovely view - we had a room facing the back and overlooking an adjoining building site, however this didn’t bother us too much as we don’t spend much time in the room on holiday. There was some noise from the nearby train line. The hotel pool is huge, shelving from ankle to chest deep, ideal for children. and absolutely gorgeous. There are plenty of sunbeds and umbrellas. The hotel supplies beach towels – ask at reception. Most of the staff were pleasant, especially the helpful reception staff. There were hardly any Brits – the vast majority of guests were Italian, with some French and Eastern Europeans. The staff speak very little English, apart from the reception staff, who are all fluent, but this is no problem – just learn to say buon giorno, per favore and grazie!
The downside for us was that the hotel was absolutely full of families with children and really most activities and facilities were designed to cater particularly for them. These are all run with safety very much in mind. We knew it was a family hotel (which is why we went in early July but overlooked that schools break for holidays earlier in Italy), and obviously we expected there to be children playing in the pool etc and that there would be activities aimed at them. But it was impossible to have a quiet dinner or even a quiet drink in the bar as that was full of children until 11 pm when it closed. The bar carries international premium brands, but prices are expensive, €5 for a small bottle of beer, a minimum €14 for a bottle of local wine, and €6 for a small cocktail.
Music is played around the pool at high volume for most of the day from 10 am to 6 pm in competition with similar noise from the adjoining hotel. There was a break at lunchtimes where the music was toned down but it was still there all the time. This is either your cup of tea or it isn’t. There seemed to be only about three CDs, so it was the same stuff again and again. We tried escaping to the “private beach” but this is another disappointment. The beach is a small strip of sand and pebbles about 20 feet wide. A bulldozer is used (sometimes during the day) to move the pebbles to each end from time to time to give a higher proportion of sand, but any rough waves soon move these back across the beach. Hence the “private” nature of the beach is created by the piles of stones at each end. Sunbeds and umbrellas are regimentally placed nose to tail over the beach area. Again, there was some construction noise from the adjoining site.
The food was atrocious and unacceptable for a hotel of this quality - like bad school dinners except without the variety, with the exception of the puddings which were OK . The main course was a choice of pork or fish on 4 days out of 5. Green beans and saute potatoes were the only option on 3 out of the 5 days. It was always a buffet - we ate late because it was a bit quieter but this meant the food was cold and dried up, especially the pasta. Generally speaking the quality was awful – examples are:
Tinned pineapples and peaches at breakfast (the only fresh fruit we saw at any meal were apples and pears)
Coco pops in the muesli (this wasn’t the odd coco pop that had got in by accident – it was full of them - anyone who wanted these could easily have added them from the bowl full)
Dry and tasteless “pizzas” which were microwaved in the poolside snack bar
Ice creams from the poolside snack bar that looked as if someone had sat on them and then refrozen them.
In the end, we went to a supermarket to get some edible food…we weren’t the only ones.
The activities were OK for the kids but not really for adults, for example the aerobics session was more like line dancing. The young staff are enthusiastic, work very hard and give a show in the evenings – again, more of an attraction for kids than adults (they were mainly mimed dance routines to taped music from West End hits like Cats and Grease).
The next bit is not the hotel’s fault but it’s worth knowing if you want to use this hotel as a base for any sight seeing. We had a car but the distances in Sicily are huge and the roads, apart from the motorways, are so mountainous that we found it impossible to go anywhere other than to Cefalu in a reasonable day-trip. We started off one day to go
to Taormina but had to give up. I'm not quite sure how far we actually went, but we drove for 6 hours and used less than half a tank of petrol! We did see Etna from the north, which was interesting, but didn't feel inclined to do a 7 hour round trip on another day to actually get to the Etna cable car on the south side which was the trip recommended by the hotel staff.
There’s not really anywhere to go around the hotel as it’s an area that’s currently being developed as a tourist resort, with lots of building work going on around (hence the view of the building site). Cefalu is quite pleasant for a day trip, although the beach there is absolutely packed.
If you want a holiday which will have plenty for your children to do, and the chance for them to interract with those from other countries in a safe environment, then this hotel might work for you. As for us, after five days we gave up, bought our own Ryanair tickets (thanks to the reception staff for letting us use the hotel’s internet) and came home 2 days early, arriving back at Stansted with a feeling of disappointment and relief.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
