Filoxenia stands on Navarinou Street at the edge of Kalamata, between Mount Taygetus and the sea. It has 300 metres on the Messinian Gulf, with olive and palm gardens running down to the water and infinity pools set among them. It reopened on 8 May 2026, after the second renovation phase.
The house holds 95 rooms and 67 suites, 162 keys in all. Every one has a private terrace or balcony facing the gulf, the gardens or the mountain, and the second phase redrew all of them around natural light, carefully chosen materials and clean lines, with marble in the bathrooms. The family suites take four to six guests: the two-bedroom ones sit beside the pools and the beach, the seafront ones look across to Taygetus.
The same phase delivered the new Olive Club and the upgraded conference centre, the Messinian Hall, which takes weddings and celebrations as well as meetings. The Olive Club is a relaxed lobby bar by day and an à la carte restaurant by night, and the veranda outside it is where afternoon tea is served.
The third piece is the Elixir Olive Spa, indoor pool and four massage cabins, with treatments rooted in local tradition and the olive tree as their theme. An indoor gym sits alongside it.
The ground before the hotel
This piece of shore has carried more than one house, on the hotel’s own account of itself. The land belonged to the Valasis family, known in Kalamata for their part in the city’s entertainment, and before any hotel existed it carried their open-air cinema, a fixture of summer evenings by the sea. At the same spot stood Kalamata’s Xenia, a small state hotel of the Greek National Tourism Organisation with 44 beds. In the mid-1970s the decision was taken to make something larger of it, and the Xenia was expanded into a resort of 600 beds by the architects Yannis Koukis and Angelos Altsitzoglou, 1975 to 1982, who gave it the scattered buildings, tiled roofs and seaward plan that still shape the site. Grecotel took the hotel into its collection later. Xenia became Filoxenia, the generous welcome of the guest.
Two phases
The first phase reopened the house in late June 2025, presented then as a grand boutique hotel and a point of reference for the city. The chambre de jardin suites run in neat rows facing the sea, and tamarisks and palms frame pools that sit level with the horizon. The second phase began in 2026 and added the wellness centre and the conference facility, which took the work to 20 million euros across two phases. Grecotel has 40 hotels in 15 Greek destinations and is family owned into its third generation. Mari N. Daskalantonaki is the group’s chief executive.
Messinia from the door
The kitchen stays close to the region. Kalamata olives, extra virgin olive oil, figs and Peloponnesian produce run through three restaurants and bars, with a beachfront gelateria for artisan gelato and homemade lemonade. The beach is pebbly and shaded by old tamarind trees, good for a late swim; the infinity pools are clad in Nile-coloured stone, with a new children’s pool beside them. Past the gardens are Kalamata’s neoclassical streets and seafront, and then the region itself: Ancient Messini, the Byzantine towns of Methoni and Koroni, the gorges and villages of Mount Taygetus, and the Mani peninsula beyond. The hotel is a sponsor of the Kalamata International Dance Festival.
Who is this for
Filoxenia suits a traveller who wants a long, unhurried seaside stay with a working Greek city at the end of the gardens. Families of several sizes fit here, and so does a couple content with a terrace, the hotel’s boutique and nothing fixed in the day. The mood is of a seafront estate from an older Greece: low tiled roofs, gardens that reach the water, swimming in the morning and shade in the afternoon. The Peloponnese starts at the gate.
