Ikos Dassia

Ikos Dassia runs along its own stretch of the Dassia coast on Corfu's east side, twenty minutes from the airport, built low and wide across gardens that reach down to 600 metres of white sand. It is a large resort, 425 rooms, and it does not pretend otherwise. What it does with that scale is spend it on choice.

That is the Ikos argument and it mostly holds. All-inclusive here means a spread of proper restaurants rather than one buffet hall with a carvery at the end: Asian at Anaya, French at Provence, Greek at Ouzo, Italian at Fresco, a deli doing the sort of lunch you would otherwise have gone out for, and a grill house that turned out to be the best of them. Wine is included and is not the cheapest thing they could pour. You stop doing the arithmetic, which is what you paid up front for.

We went in May with a six-month-old and took a Deluxe Junior Suite Bungalow, which comes with a small private pool and a bit of garden, at €664 a night. The pool is the reason to book that room rather than a cheaper one. With a baby it means somewhere to sit outside during a nap and after bedtime, on a property big enough that walking to a main pool with a sleeping child is its own expedition. The creche takes them from six months, so Daphne was eligible to the week, though we never used it; the kids club from four is included rather than charged for, and two of the pools and the spa are adults-only, so the place is genuinely trying to serve both halves of a family holiday rather than picking one. Go this early and the pools do the work, incidentally: in May the sea is still too cold to be worth the walk.

What it is not is a way to see Corfu. Dassia is a quiet stretch of coast and the resort is built to be the destination, so leaving it means paying for a taxi to go and spend money on food you have already bought. We barely saw the island. That is the honest cost of all-inclusive done this well: it works exactly as intended, and what it is designed to do is keep you where you are.