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Set on the beach, a 15 minute walk out of Sami village itself is the Sami Beach Hotel Kefalonia. A small hotel with a large pool which never felt full, tennis courts, boules, a small playground, table tennis and the friendliest of staff. It’s full of families, many that have returned year on year. 

The pool area has lots of shade, loads of sun beds and never felt busy even when the hotel was full like when we stayed.

The rooms whilst not the biggest we’ve stayed in, are spotless and cleaned every day. It’s also useful that the garden rooms at the back of the hotel facing onto the garden can interconnect meaning our three children could stay in the next door room to us but get to us in the night easily if needs be. There was also a table and chair to sit out on outside the back doors and a useful clothes dryer. The rooms had hairdryers, safes and a mini fridge too. There wasn’t tea making facilities in the room but you could ask for these to be added.

All this at price of €220 a night at Sami Beach Hotel Kefalonia for five of us in two rooms in August. We’ve stayed at places, about the same kind of nice, for twice the price before.

The room price also includes breakfast, with a variety of items that suited almost all of us. My eldest is notoriously fussy so we simply bought her a box of her favourite cereal at the local supermarket and she took that with her to breakfast.

Snacks and meals are served at the poolside bar between 10 and 4. Service was friendly and the food good. My only niggle was that I’d love to have seen this service continue into the evening in case you didn’t want to go out. Perhaps a slimmed down version with a few dips and pitta, and a pizza or two for the kids. 

In reality though, and I expect the reason they don’t do food, is that the 15/20 minute walk into Sami brings with it a whole host of gorgeous restaurants, and the opportunity to walk off some of that dinner on the way home.

We ate at quite a few of the restaurants during our ten day stay at Sami Beach Hotel Kefalonia. 

Our favourites being Il Familia, Deco, Akrogiali and Karnagio. We did try local favourite The Mermaid and while cheaper than the others mentioned we didn’t think it lived up to its reputation. We also had really good pizza at Tereza one evening after a long day.

Kefalonia is a smallish island and from our base at the Sami Beach Hotel Kefalonia the furthest we drove was to Fiskardo in the North which was 50 minutes away. We didn’t drive to the West of the Island as we were moving onto that side for the second week.

We visited the popular Myrtos Beach (15 minutes away) and avoided the crowds due to arriving at 9am. 

We loved Alaties Beach and Jerusalem Beach both with small restaurants (do book) with gorgeous food and service. We also arrived at these early, and packed a couple of the umbrellas that have been left at the hotel by other guests.

We also enjoyed Emplisi and Foki also both near Fiskardo for different reasons. The first was stunning and empty first thing with crystal clear water, the second has rocks which are perfect for jumping in!

Melanissi caves is on every top ten list of things to do in Kefalonia you read. It was a 3 minute drive from the hotel (you can walk). The optimum time to visit is 12pm when the sun shines right into the centre of the cave and turns the water turquoise blue. It turns out it’s also the optimum time for 8-10 coaches to turn up too, meaning the queue (in August) to get in can be close to 2 hours long. The cave is impressive, but in my view not much is worth waiting that long for. We went back at 10am the next day and walked straight in. 

You can buy a ticket for just Melanissi or a dual ticket for the Droganatti caves too. As we intended to do both and were so close by we bought this. You can use the ticket on the same day or on different days like we did. 

Another beach closer to Sami Beach Hotel Kefalonia is Antisamos which has lots of beach bars and watersports. The kids will say their second best day was the sofa pulled by speedboat at this beach. We did this late afternoon when it was slightly less hot.

Without doubt the best day we had while staying at Sami Beach Hotel Kefalonia was a boat trip with Seven Seas Boats, who are based just 200m from Sami Beach Hotel. As a family of 5 we needed a larger boat so this was €200 plus fuel. In high season you do need to book in advance.

Sami Beach Hotel Kefalonia was a fantastic place to stay during out first 10 days in Kefalonia. Relaxing, friendly, great pool, right on the beach, close walk to restaurants with fantastic staff. I think we might be back.If you want to see more of the things we did when we stayed at Sami Beach Hotel Kefalonia check out our Kefalonia Instagram Stories.

To book contact the hotel directly. Sami Beach Hotel Kefalonia