I lost count of the number of fellow guests at the Neilson Messini Beach Club who told us this trip was not their first visit to the sprawling fitness resort which sits on a private beach near Kalamata in the Peloponnese region of mainland Greece.
One couple we made friends with on the first evening, while our toddlers played (in the excellent playground), sheepishly told us they had visited twice the previous year alone. This conversation repeated many times in several forms over the first day or so. I remember thinking that it was a nice hotel, but that there was nothing particularly distinctive about it. We appeared to be in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farmland and olive groves, meaning no popping to the shops to waste money on European crisps and olives. Initially, there was no wow factor and I struggled to understand what all the fuss was about.
