Elounda Mare Relais & Châteaux Hotel
Elounda Mare Hotel is an 82-key luxury hotel on a sandy private stretch of Mirabello Bay at Elounda, Greece’s first member of Relais & Chateaux, which it joined in 1987. Elounda Mare opened in 1982 as the first hotel of Spyros and Eliana Kokotos and claims the Mediterranean’s first bungalows with private pools, and guests score it 9.3 out of 10 on Booking.com and 4.6 out of 5 on Tripadvisor across 724 reviews. Our verdict lands at 8.7 out of 10: the most intimate of Elounda’s great hotels, with value at 4.2 the familiar local caveat.
Hotel information
| Hotel | Elounda Mare Relais & Châteaux Hotel |
|---|---|
| Address | Main Street |
| Type | Air conditioning · Airport shuttle |
| Style | Intimate classic luxury hotel, Relais & Chateaux |
| Signature | Private-pool bungalows, claimed first in the Mediterranean |
| Keys | 82 rooms, suites, and bungalows |
| Dining | Old Mill fine dining, Yacht Club fish house, Deck breakfast |
| History | Opened 1982 by Spyros and Eliana Kokotos; Relais & Chateaux since 1987 |
| Nearest airport | Heraklion (HER), about 70 km by road |
| Booking.com rating | 9.3/10 (177 reviews) |
| Tripadvisor rating | 4.6/5 (724 reviews) |
| CreteLocals score | 8.7/10 · read the verdict |
Booking.com and Tripadvisor scores checked on September 19, 2026.
Location
Elounda Mare Relais & Châteaux Hotel is located at Main Street, in Elounda town. The map below shows the exact spot; Google Maps and Waze give turn-by-turn directions.
Who Elounda Mare suits, and who should skip it
Elounda Mare suits guests who measure luxury in quiet rather than square metres, and it suits them because 82 keys on this much bayfront produces the rarest Elounda commodity: space without spectacle. Honeymoons recur in its review chips. The lists below come from recurring themes in the hotel’s 724 Tripadvisor reviews and 177 Booking.com reviews.
Advantages
- Location and cleanliness both scored 4.8, on a quiet, genuinely sandy private beach
- Private-pool bungalows, the category that made the hotel’s name
- Relais & Chateaux standards held since 1987, the first in Greece
- Dining split between the Old Mill, the Yacht Club fish house with its fish night, and the Deck’s breakfast veranda
- Six Senses Spa and 9-hole golf at the adjoining sister resorts
- Long, unobstructed swimming with Spinalonga on the horizon
Disadvantages
- Value scores 4.2, with extras pricing the recurring theme rather than quality failures
- Mattresses run soft, a specific and repeated recent complaint
- Old Mill fine dining can underwhelm against its billing
- Facilities live partly next door, since spa and golf belong to the sister resorts
The rooms: the bungalow is the hotel
Elounda Mare spreads 82 keys between main-building rooms and the garden bungalows whose private pools defined a genre, superior bungalows leading the mentions.
Take the bungalow. The main-building rooms are comfortable and correctly priced against them, but the private-pool bungalow under the olive trees is the artefact this hotel invented, and it remains the version guests describe decades later. Light sleepers and firm-mattress loyalists should raise the bedding question at booking, since the softness complaint is specific and recent.
The bay, the Yacht Club and the Old Mill
The bayfront is quiet, sandy, and served with the efficiency 4 decades of practice produce, with swimming that runs long and unobstructed toward the Spinalonga view. The main pool and beach bar hold the middle of the day.
Evenings divide by mood: the Yacht Club does fish by the water, with its fish night the week’s fixture, while the Old Mill dresses Cretan fine dining in candlelight, and the champagne glass at sunset is practically liturgy here. The Six Senses Spa and the 9-hole course sit next door within the family estate, cross-used by Mare guests.
How to get there
Elounda Mare is about 70 km from Heraklion airport (HER) by road, roughly 1 hour and 10 minutes via Agios Nikolaos, on the Elounda coast road beside Porto Elounda and Elounda Peninsula. The village is minutes away.
Three transport options cover the trip, and each fits a different stay. A pre-booked transfer suits the hotel’s rhythm; our guide to taxi and airport transfer services in Crete lists the operators and typical prices. A hire car adds Agios Nikolaos and the Lasithi east, and our car rental in Crete page compares local rates. The Elounda bus and a short taxi close the budget option.
The Crete Locals review
Elounda Mare is the hotel we recommend to guests who find the modern luxury resort slightly embarrassing, because nothing here performs: no swim-up spectacle, no brand collaborations shouting from the gate, just whitewash, olive trees, a sandy bay, and rooms that assume you came for those. It was the Kokotos family’s first hotel and reads like a family’s taste rather than a corporation’s, which is precisely what Relais & Chateaux certified in 1987 and what the 9.3 Booking score certifies now. The founder’s death in 2025 closed a chapter; the hotel he built still teaches the coast manners.
Its trick is borrowing scale without carrying it. The Six Senses Spa, the golf, the Peninsula’s restaurants all sit within the family estate next door, so an 82-key hotel offers a 300-key facilities map while keeping its own beach at 82-key density. The Yacht Club’s fish night remains, by review consensus, one of the bay’s honest great dinners.
The gripes stay in proportion. Value at 4.2 is Elounda’s tax and shows up here as extras pricing rather than broken promises; the soft mattresses are a real, fixable irritation worth flagging at booking; and the Old Mill’s reputation writes cheques its kitchen does not always cash, which stings at its prices. Nothing in the record touches the setting, the housekeeping, or the people.
Book Elounda Mare as the connoisseur’s Elounda: a superior bungalow with its pool, the fish night anchored mid-week, one Old Mill evening with expectations set at lovely rather than transcendent, and May, June, or September light on the bay. It is the stay the newer resorts are still trying to reverse-engineer.
