I first met Odyssia, the third generation of the Grecotel hotel family, when staying at The DOLLI in Athens. I sat down with her and her mother, Mari, who runs the company, and was completely charmed by them personally and their vision for the hotel group. Then a year ago, I stayed at Cape Sounio, their lovely property about an hour from Athens in the most magical location, looking onto the Temple of Poseidon. I was particularly impressed by their spa, which had just reopened under the direction of Vicky Vlachonis, a renowned wellness leader, who Odyssia had cold contacted. We started this column to highlight the interesting people we meet in hospitality, and I’m so happy to introduce you to this super clever woman with incredible taste, who is doing great things for this country I love so much. —Yolanda
Grecotel was founded by your grandfather, Nikos Daskalantonakis, in Crete. What was his very first hotel and original vision for the brand?
My grandfather was never trained to be a hotelier — he was an olive man through and through. He was born in Rethymno, in Crete, and his first job was at an oil press, VIESAP, that also made soaps from that same oil. He watched the great families of Crete who refused to adapt quietly disappear, and he refused to let that happen to his own family. So in the early 1970s, he and his brother sold everything and put their savings into tourism instead.
In 1975, they opened their first hotel just outside Rethymno, called El Greco. At the time, Rethymno wasn’t even on the map per se: my grandfather says that when he received mail, the envelope read, “beyond Heraklion” (instead of Rethymno). Slowly, and through those first hotels, Crete found a way out of poverty that didn’t cost it its soul: it kept its young people rather than losing them to the mainland, and it watched foreigners fall in love with its monuments and loved them a little harder itself, since they appreciated them too. Rethymno became a destination.
He is a real self-made entrepreneur — I can’t imagine how he did all these things back then without having seen them, without having ever left Crete. He aspired to showcase the best of Greece: our omnipresent history, our idyllic nature, our heartfelt gastronomy, and our generous and spirited people.
Staying true to his vision, Grecotel has come to be one of the longest-standing independent, family-owned hospitality groups in the world today. The Group is constantly enriching its portfolio and evolving its signature, aiming to an exciting future, while preserving its familial essence and elan as a source of solidity and innovation.
How many hotels does Grecotel have now, and how has the vision evolved?
In our family, hospitality has always been a way of welcoming someone not just into a room, but into a place and its traditions. In a way, there’s a duality to our mission: one half is about the guest and representing Greece to them; the other is about strengthening Greece and its people.
Since its founding, Grecotel has stayed faithful to a vision shared by my grandfather and my mother, Mari — an ability to bring people together and curate an immersive world where each destination shines and amplifies the next. The people they brought into their orbit, the relationships they built, the places they chose and their savoir-faire thread through every narrative: it all reinforces our ties to historical gravitas, true contemporary energy, and a commitment to both excellence and legacy. For half a century, that combination has made Grecotel synonymous with Greece itself — creating destinations, creating feelings, and leaving impressions not only of Grecotel, but of the country that inspired it.
Sensitive to society and its evolving nature, we have always tied our growth closely to that of the local ecosystems around us — engaging with regions’ communities, universities, museums and suppliers, and contributing to the cultural, social, economic and environmental vitality of our destinations.
For us, that promise has always meant more than certification. Sustainability today (environmental and social) seems to be a one-off badge. Something you can just tick off the list. Grecotel has taught me it is dynamic and therefore reliant on people to be eligible. It has meant creating generations of livelihoods, helping to sustain entire villages and communities, keeping our talent at home, and helping the destinations we work in truly thrive. All this together has meant that we have managed to scale to 40 hotels in 15 destinations.
What was it like growing up in a hospitality family — did you spend a lot of time in the hotels?
I spent my childhood summers as one of the myriad little figures running around the hotels — one hell of a time, playing at our kids’ clubs, Grecoland, across the resorts, meeting people from every corner of the world and every walk of life. As I grew older, playing turned into learning, too: my grandfather ushered me, from a young age, into understanding what work and responsibility actually entailed — to dream up my own “mini” projects or products and execute them however I thought best. To try and to fail. To try again, and to succeed.
My family raised me with so much love: to love nature, to love animals, to love food, to love people above all, with all their faults. If you work in this industry, you need to love people — otherwise you cannot provide what we want to provide to those who choose to spend their few days of vacation with us. It is an honor, above all else.
Any fun or colourful childhood memories from that period?
I was always trailing after my grandfather and my mother, watching how they built these microcosms — how an unknown stretch of coastline became a full-blown destination. How they reimagined a hotel, selected which plants went where, moved a sofa three times until it was right, and how they inspired and built a workforce of real caliber. Even then, languages were part of it — training across the board, almost a design code in themselves, because true hospitality has always meant true personalization to us.
But the best memories are simpler than that. My favorite times were either being part of the family performances Grecoland used to put on — we had so much fun backstage, dancing and singing in front of our own families — or the summer my mother brought the Cousteau diving programme to Greece for the first time. I spent every single day at our kids’ club in Cape Sounio that year, at every dive, learning everything there was to know about the ocean and the Attica ecosystem. I remember the thrill of it so clearly.
What is your role now with Grecotel? Did you always imagine you’d join the company—and did you do something else before joining that shaped what you bring to your current role?
Today I serve as Executive Director of the Group. From a young age, my family infused me with what I think of as the “creation gene”: the idea that our purpose should be to create something for the betterment of society, to create beauty, solutions, jobs, and to follow your instincts. They never limited me; they gave me their all to explore and think openly. Part of that is what we call “Culture to Culture” at Grecotel — a long-standing, deeply personal effort of ours. Born into an ancient land, what grounds us most is preservation: the excavations and Museum of Ancient Eleutherna, the Rethymno Folk Museum, the Natural History Museum of Athens, the Philharmonic Orchestras of Corfu, the Venetian monastery of St. Irene in Crete, to name a few of the journeys we’re honored to be part of.
It was only on the other side of the world, in the city of brotherly love at UPenn, that distance gave me the perspective to really understand what my family had built, and it changed how I saw things. I used to think our business wasn’t sustainable, precisely because it was so tied up in construction. But away from it, I realized how different we actually are: we don’t buy and sell assets, we reinvest everything we have back into the places we operate, because every one of them is a one-of-a-kind location. And in understanding that sustainability, I understood something else too — that what we do is Hellenism itself. Hellenism, in this case, meaning not just the ancient past, but Greek identity and culture as a living, ongoing spirit. My college friends, who came from all over the world and who’ve become family, helped me see that too: that the way we show Greece is worth keeping alive. We’re showing the real Greece to the world, not a cookie-cutter version of it.
Being family owned is rarer than people realize, since whole family chains have been disappearing from Greece since Grecotel first showed it could be done. I see first-hand what that independence means: a face behind every decision, and the ability to act fast when it matters. When Covid hit, Grecotel was the first European company to announce it would reopen its hotels, under a strict rulebook, offering our people employment and our guests a safe destination. Human values, not profit values, are what carried us through — and what our generation’s job is now: to preserve and carry this craft forward.
Much like my name, and like C.P. Cavafy’s poem about Ithaca, my life has felt like an odyssey: an adventure where you learn to cherish the journey itself. My role is being shaped daily and the adventure of learning and serving continues…
Best thing about working with your family? Most frustrating?
My grandfather is our founder and President of the Group — and at ninety, he still looks after our agricultural activities personally: the “edible gardens,” as we like to call them, across the hotels that supply our kitchens, and his own farm, Agreco, in Crete. My mother has been at the helm as CEO for almost twenty years. Beyond her intellect and her sensitive business instinct, she has a real love and talent for hospitality, and has cultivated the identity of each hotel and of the business at large.
Her experience and love of craft are evident in every corner, as is the way she constantly recalibrates the idea of luxury. What touches her most is a guest’s letter noticing every brushstroke of their stay, a child’s drawing thanking her for the best holiday of their life, or watching the people she once believed in — long before they believed in themselves — grow into the leaders she always knew they could be.
I can’t list the best things about working with my family — it’s all the little nuances: a look across the table that says everything, a conversation that begins during a meeting and carries on over dinner, a hotel visit that turns unexpected in the best way possible, and a lightbulb moment that spurs into our next creation.
The most frustrating thing? Getting a call from pops first thing in the morning if I’m running even a few minutes late. He knows that I know he’s watching the clock — and he calls anyway.
What do you obsess over in a hotel that guests may never consciously notice?
One of the things we obsess over the most is giving guests the best of what our soil produces. This started with my grandfather who of course would test the food and if a particular grape wasn’t up to par for that season, he would instruct the chefs to simply not offer it. Our procurement and chef brigade have spent years finding the right suppliers, testing every single batch, and serving only what’s in season and what we would genuinely eat ourselves.
Guests notice the flavor, of course — they comment on it. What they don’t quite see is how much quality assurance happens before any of it reaches their plate.
THE DOLLI is such a jewel box, and quite different in size — how does it work within the portfolio?
THE DOLLI at Acropolis is created as “A Hotel to Live:” being surrounded by beautiful people, extraordinary service, genuine care, and the inexplicable beauty of the world’s great creators. Much like the city it was born in, it’s written in the treasures of old cultures and the new world, and it pays homage to the art that inspired all art — the beauty that inspired all beauty — the Acropolis itself.
My mother’s prevailing aesthetic and inspiration for the hotel was the Surrealist movement. It was that instinct that makes the Acropolis appear to float on the surface of THE DOLLI’s pool — Athens reimagined not only to be seen, “but to be lived with the subconscious,” as she told me a day before the opening on January 1, 2023. Many of the artists she references visited Greece in their time or were inspired by the Hellenic world; we call them our “DOLLI geniuses.”
Creating THE DOLLI let us reach the heart and soul of people from every walk of life and welcome them into the Greek vision of hosting — a world that blends antiquity, art, real luxury, touches of technology, and real generosity. That’s our philosophy as much as it is our product.
Given your family’s “commitment to infuse hospitality with personality and emotions,” if your hotels were children, who would you say is… ?
The perfectionist / high achiever: THE DOLLI at Acropolis. It took seven years to get her ready — perfect enough for her city, and for the universe. She’s the first and only building in Greece to receive the Prix Versailles award for architecture and design, and this year Travel + Leisure‘s readers named her the No.1 City Hotel in Athens, and No.5 in Europe. The mansion itself was designed in the mid-1920s by Andreas Kriezis, the architect who would later convert the Athenian Royal Palace into what is now the Greek Parliament… just too good to be true.
The quiet one: Cape Sounio. This one doesn’t need to perform for anyone — it has the Temple of Poseidon for company, and Byron’s name still carved into its marble. You arrive and your shoulders drop immediately, surrendering to where the Aegean truly begins: myth has it that King Aegeus threw himself from these cliffs, having seen his son Theseus’s ship returning with black sails and believing him dead — which is why the islet just offshore is still called “Archi,” Greek for “beginning.” The whole property sits on an archaeological site, with ruins woven right into the hotel itself. A natural pine forest means that from the temple itself, you don’t even see the hotel — it’s lost entirely in the verdant landscape. Quiet, invisible but energetically the strongest — the right people always discover it.
The free spirit: Mykonos Blu. Discover the happy Aegean of our childhood — of archaeologists and architects, anthropologists and painters. Find the light they found. A blue world of Cycladic simplicity, on the most famous beach on the island, Psarou: windy and liberating, with views wherever you look — blue on blue on blue.
The flirt everyone falls for: Corfu Imperial. Greece’s most impressively located resort and previously an “Astir Palace” property. Cinematic, private, a garden of the gods — impossible not to love, pure Fellini, with a seafront that borrows the same romance as the island’s famous esplanade. Palazzos on the water & wooden walkways filled with the smell of jasmine.
The old soul: Hotel Filoxenia in Kalamata. Straight out of an Agatha Christie novel — the Grande Dame of the Peloponnese, between Mount Taygetus and the Messinian Gulf, where mountain, sea, olive groves and myths all meet. A private pebbled beach shaded by tamarisk trees, infinity pools in Nile-colored stone, and Ancient Messene just beyond the gates — she’s been woven into Kalamata’s daily life for generations, long before Grecotel.
My baby: Amirandes. The first luxury hotel in Greece, on the island of Crete — she’s the one who proved Greek hospitality could lead the world, not just host it. The first two summers it was open, I was responsible for running the hotel shop: I was eight years old and it was my first job.
There are places in the world that are simply magical. And then there are places standing across from the miracles of the Ancient World. Cape Sounio is one of them. The light reflecting off the Aegean, the sound of the pines in the wind, the Temple of Poseidon standing like a sleepless guardian — you feel you’re on sacred ground. You don’t need to be a spiritual person to feel it. You just stand, take a breath, and your body remembers.
The ancient Greeks chose it for a reason when they built their second most important temple, Poseidon’s temple, and the mineral wealth of the region: the silver of Laurion, once minted the coins of Athens. I knew we needed an expert who could match and amplify a destination like that. I like to say that Vicky is Greeker than the Greeks, even though she has spent her entire life away from home — and an expert in her field. Grecotel doesn’t usually do collaborations; this was actually my first solo project.
When I met Vicky, I felt an instant connection. Born in Athens and based in Los Angeles, she has spent over two decades at the world’s top clinics alongside pioneering doctors, treating pain through the mind/body connection. But more than that, she understood our ethos as a company, the power of genuine service, of taking care of others. Once I felt that, I knew I could trust her to build something with me worthy of this place. Where extraordinary myth meets renowned expertise, Elevations of Wellness was born: a journey in History, Healing and Happiness, inspired by the unique setting and innate energy of the place. Each level rises to meet guests’ evolving needs, emphasizing the connection between physical, digestive and emotional well-being — from therapeutic massages, grounding rituals and olive oil dry brushing to guided hikes and meditations, blending ancient Greek healing traditions with modern science.
As a traveler, I’d visited wellness destinations around the world that sometimes felt over the top, and I wanted balance — that’s Greek philosophy too. The ancient Greeks say Πᾶν μέτρον ἄριστον: everything in moderation. So, you can hike up to the temple in the morning, meditate facing it with the in-room meditation Vicky recorded on site, slip into a real state of tranquility, then swim, and end the day with a glass of Greek wine and a beautiful meal. We never wanted to force anyone. As Vicky says, we “meet them where they are,” and help as much as we can in the days they choose to spend with us at Cape Sounio.
Now in its second year, the program has grown — with Vicky’s Full Moon Rituals, and, most serendipitously, a private cove below the spa that we discovered after twenty-five years of the hotel being part of our portfolio. It’s reachable only through the spa. We took it as a cosmic sign: it’s now home to the In-Sea Meditation.
OK, we want to know: who gets the upgrades?
We operate like a family — so if you know someone who knows someone, do it. Use it. But the upgrades I love most are the ones nobody asks for: the couple celebrating 50 years together, the guest who has returned every summer for decades, first as a kid and now with their own family, the child whose birthday happens to fall on the last night of the holiday. Our teams have a sixth sense for those moments — and they’re almost always right.
When you travel, you must experience other properties through the lens of what they get right (or wrong). What are three of your favorite hotels in the world and why?
There are so many beautiful hotels around the world, so I will be a little cheeky and share some from my favorite countries:
In Morocco — Royal Mansour in Marrakesh and Villa Mabrouka in Tangier, for their fairytale worlds and for being true local players.
In Italy — The Gritti, because Venice forever. I’ve been going every year since I was little, though I must admit Aman Venice may have my heart now…
In France — Hotel Costes. A place I would live in if I could.
Sell us on Crete! What do you love about it and what does it have that other islands don’t?
Well, I am biased here, but this is the island of real food, real people, and real history.
I’m the only generation of my family not born and raised on the island, but every summer, most Easters, etc. were spent there. Most of my close family still lives there — and in Crete, fourth cousins count as close family — many of them working in the family business, alongside the people in our hotels who raised me and showed me filoxenia first-hand, and whom I’m now so proud to call colleagues.
Before Greece was Greece, there was Crete. And before Crete was a destination, it was a civilization — the first Europe ever knew. The Minoans flourished here from around 3000 to 1450 BC; the first palace at Knossos rose around 1900 BC, and they wrote in Linear, a script no one has deciphered to this day. They traced the blueprints of beauty itself: the fresco, the courtyard, the sacred bull, the labyrinth at the heart of everything. The whole island is archaeology you can live inside: Knossos, Phaistos, Zakros, and Eleutherna. Peel back the landscape and there is history. Peel back the history and there is myth. Peel back the myth — and there is the sea, shimmering, eternal, unchanged.
Filoxenia doesn’t really translate. Literally, it means “friend of the stranger” — the closest English word is hospitality — but as my colleague Eleni says, “It isn’t something we do. It’s who we are.” In Crete, generosity is everything, and nine times out of ten it shows in how full the table can get. Literally. It’s in our DNA, and it’s why so many people associate Grecotel with a feeling of abundance: even across fifteen destinations, our hospitality springs from Crete.
Which brings me to Agreco, my grandfather’s organic farm in Rethymno, in the family since 1995 — no hotel attached, just land, animals, and people who’ve been doing this the same way for generations. He created it for two reasons: so that he and his loved ones could eat the way his mother and grandmother cooked, and save the island’s original seeds, from fig trees to Cretan horta and wild artichokes. He’d noticed that the fruit, or a certain bean, at the tavernas no longer burst with the flavor he remembered. I only truly understood that when I moved to the US — it’s when I stopped taking Greek food for granted. What the industry now calls “farm-to-table,” in Crete we simply call it lunch. Grecotel was among the first to connect tourism so closely with gastronomy and the land, and that’s because of what Crete has that other islands don’t: it can feed itself. As Greece’s largest island, it holds an entire world within it — mountains, plains, gorges and sea, olive groves and vineyards, wild herbs, cheeses and honey. Most islands are visited for their coastline; Crete is lived through its table. I promise you food and produce will never taste the same once you’ve visited.
Then there are the mountains. Crete is where Zeus was born — hidden by his mother Rhea in the Dictaean Cave, and raised in the Idaean Cave on Mount Ida, today’s Psiloritis, the island’s highest peak, while the Corybantes clashed their shields to drown out his cries, so his father, Cronus, wouldn’t find and swallow him. Our forty-herb mountain tea comes from those same slopes, gathered by hand by people whose knowledge of the island’s endemic plants fascinates me: dittany, the “love herb;” malotira, for the stomach; Cretan thyme, the island’s famous honey plant. I only know the basics, and I hope to keep learning. And many other varieties that only grow there…
Luxury today lives in the simplest things. We use the word “luxury” with so many meanings now, but what counts — what people finally weigh in my opinion — is the simple and the true. Crete still values the simple and true. Most of Crete still feels untouched by globalization; its people keep the traditions alive every day. Come in winter, when the mountains are at their most beautiful and our hotel Amirandes is open year-round, and you’ll see it for yourself.
What’s one thing you wish guests could be better at — not just at your hotels, but in general?
Itinerary “planning.” Now more than ever, guests arrive with full-blown itineraries they often can’t even complete — and so many of them are built almost entirely from social media. Some of those places are wonderful; some are best admired on a screen. In my view that’s not the way to experience any place, let alone Greece. Spontaneity has always been the name of the game here — even in peak season, a little kindness, a little spontaneity, and a little luck will go a long way. Zeus willing.
Grecotel recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. What did that milestone mean to you personally, having three generations working together?
Our biggest celebration was held where it all began — in Rethymno, at the Fortezza castle — and seeing the new generation of our team on stage alongside us, with their mentors, parents and colleagues in the crowd, is something I still can’t put into words. It reinforced to me what a rare privilege it is to be surrounded by our family of 7,500, who share the Grecotel culture and have passed on to me, generation after generation, the deep essence of filoxenia.
In Crete we live by our emblems and symbols, and Grecotel is fortunate to have its founder as its foremost one. My grandfather — Mr. Nikos, as everyone calls him — is the personification of our values: a symbol that endures, resists and captivates. A humble person who never forgot where he started from. Talk to people in Greece and many will call Grecotel “the school,” because over 50 years he inspired a whole generation of highly skilled hospitality professionals, many of whom now occupy leadership roles in our company and in hotels across the country. He personally helped thousands of people, who today come up to me with the most unbelievable stories. Every position within a hotel is not merely a workplace, but a training ground for local talent — a way of preserving tradition through people while gently shaping the future. This gives me so much hope in these dark times, in which I yearn for explanations.
Those celebrations made me realize that we are really in the business of uplifting people and creating emotions: the latter for our guests first and foremost, but just as much for our own people. Guests return not only to a destination, but to people they know, and to feelings they want to relive. Beneath the design, the polished service and the tailored experiences lies something far more enduring: filoxenia, the belief that hospitality isn’t a transaction but a feeling, and that details aren’t just details — they’re everything.
There is a palpable difference between storytelling built as a branding exercise and storytelling that comes from an authentic place; it’s rare today for a brand to stand on quality and heritage alone. I can’t fathom what 50 consecutive years even means — my brain can’t calibrate it. But I think this is the true legacy of Grecotel: a hospitality shaped not by standardization, but by soul. A quiet art passed down, refined and renewed, extending far beyond the word “welcome.”
Can we have a preview of any upcoming projects?
Look out for Mykonos Blu, as Vicky Vlachonis is shaping something there the island hasn’t quite seen before — wellness at its most advanced, set against the most luminous blue of the Aegean. At Cape Sounio, the philosophy deepens: Vicky will lead intimate retreats in person, beneath the Temple of Poseidon, all about listening to the body, instead of rigidly following a predetermined program or treatment plan. In Crete, Amirandes is entering a new chapter — like all good myths, it will be revealed in its own time. And in Messinia, Olive Club opens at Filoxenia Kalamata: a garden that wanders down into the sea, an old-world, glamorous space that never truly went out of style — the city’s next great meeting place.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.