How Ikos got here
Every other company in this category spent decades getting to where it is. Ikos has existed since 2015, and it arrived with a specific argument: that the reason to prepay a holiday is convenience rather than economy, and that a resort confident enough in that should be willing to pay for you to go out for dinner somewhere else.
Founded 2015 · Halkidiki, Greece · Run from Pylaia, Thessaloniki · Last reviewed August 2026
- 1970
Sani, on the same peninsula
Anastasios Andreadis and his partners begin developing Sani on the Kassandra peninsula in Halkidiki. Over decades it grows into a resort community rather than a hotel: several properties, a marina, restaurants, shops and a large area of protected wetland and forest. His sons take it on, Andreas becoming chief executive in 1995 and Stavros president, and they push it toward the upper end of the family market.
- 2015
The question Sani could not answer
Sani worked, but it worked the conventional luxury way: you chose your room and then paid for a great deal of what followed. The Andreadis brothers had spent twenty years watching what families actually found difficult about a holiday, and concluded it was not the price so much as the running tally. Ikos is the answer to that, built as a separate brand rather than a change to Sani, because the two solve different problems and would have spoiled each other.
- 2015
Two openings, five weeks apart
Ikos Oceania opens first, on 27 March, a rebuild of the group's existing Oceania Club near Nea Moudania, on a terraced hillside looking across the Gulf of Thermaikos toward Mount Olympus. Ikos Olivia follows on 1 May at Gerakini, about 22 acres of rooms and low bungalows among mature olive trees, and it is the first property designed as an Ikos from the start. Which one counts as the first Ikos depends on whether you mean the first to open or the first built to the idea.
- 2018
Corfu, and the method becomes visible
Ikos Dassia opens on Corfu, made from the former Dassia Chandris and Corfu Chandris hotels. The pattern it establishes is the one the company keeps using: buy an older resort holding a site nobody could get permission to build on today, close it, rebuild it substantially, and reopen it to a single service standard. It is why several Ikos resorts have a longer history than their Ikos opening date suggests.
- 2019
Kos, with a basilica offshore
Ikos Aria opens on Kos, with the ruins of the Basilica of Agios Stefanos on an islet just off the beach, which is an unusually direct way of putting the destination in front of guests. Aria also helps push the Local Drive idea across the portfolio.
- 2021
Out of Greece
Ikos Andalusia opens between Estepona and Marbella, rebuilt from the Costa del Sol Princess and the company's first resort outside Greece. It proves the formula is not a Greek hospitality trick, puts it in front of the British and northern European market year-round, and makes Spain the second home base. Tripadvisor names it the best family hotel in the world for 2023, which is a useful thing to be able to say when your argument is that family and luxury belong in the same sentence.
- 2022
A sovereign wealth fund buys in
GIC of Singapore agrees to become the leading shareholder in Sani/Ikos Group, in a deal reported to value the business at 2.3 billion euros, seven years after the first Ikos opened. The Andreadis brothers and Mathieu Guillemin, the French investor who helped form the group in 2015, stay on as shareholders and in charge. It is an investment rather than a sale to another chain: the resorts are still owned and run by Sani/Ikos.
- 2023
Two resorts on one day, and one of them is on Club Med's old ground
On 16 June the company opens Ikos Odisia on Corfu and Ikos Porto Petro on Mallorca simultaneously. Odisia occupies about 60 acres across the bay from Dassia, on land that used to hold a Club Med, so one generation of the European all-inclusive gave the site to the next. Porto Petro sits between coves near Mondragó Natural Park, on the island where the packaged beach holiday was worked out in the first place.
- 2026
Crete, and a new chief executive
Ikos Kissamos opens on Kissamos Bay in western Crete, the company's first Cretan resort and largely assembled from separate parcels rather than converted from one older hotel. On 1 January, Jean-Marc Bellaiche becomes group chief executive, with Andreas Andreadis and Mathieu Guillemin stepping back to co-founders and managing partners. Eleven years in, the entrepreneurial phase hands over to an institutional one.
What the dates leave out
It pays for you to leave
Dine Out includes meals at selected restaurants outside the resort, and Local Drive Adventure includes the use of a car for a day, currently an electric MINI. Read commercially this is strange, because a resort that has already taken your money for dinner would rather serve it. Read as design it is the clearest statement the company makes: it is selling the removal of decisions and bills, not the confinement of guests, and a prepaid meal you can spend in a village taverna is worth more than one you cannot.
What Infinite Lifestyle actually meant
À-la-carte menus developed with Michelin-starred chefs, premium international spirits, a wine list included rather than surcharged, room service around the clock, waiter service at the beach and the pool, childcare run to UK Ofsted standards, no wristband. The marketing language has moved on twice, to Unconditional Luxury and then to Beyond All-Inclusive, and the underlying claim has not changed: a prepaid holiday should not feel like a cheaper holiday.
Low-friction luxury for families
Ikos does not define luxury as the absence of children, which is the more common route to a high room rate in this category. Nurseries, kids' clubs, teen programmes, family suites, football academies and babysitting sit alongside adults-only pools and quiet zones inside the same resort. It is a sharp piece of positioning: the family with young children is the guest who gains most from having food, childcare, drinks and activities already paid for, and is the most willing to pay for the certainty.
Most of these resorts had a previous life
Oceania was the Oceania Club. Dassia was two Chandris hotels. Andalusia was the Costa del Sol Princess. Odisia was a Club Med. The Mediterranean coast has very little space left where a large beachfront resort could be permitted from scratch, so the sites that matter are already occupied, and the way to get one is to buy the hotel standing on it. The exception is Kissamos, assembled from many parcels, which is the harder route. Odisia is the one worth pausing on: Club Med put a village on that Corfu bay decades ago, and the land passed from the company that popularised the European all-inclusive to the company arguing about what it should cost.
It owns what it runs
Sani/Ikos owns and operates its resorts rather than franchising the name to other people's buildings, which is the opposite of how most large hotel groups grow and the same model AMResorts deliberately avoided. It is slower and far more capital-hungry. It is also why the standard holds across the portfolio, and it is presumably what a sovereign wealth fund was buying.
Mallorca, closing a circle
Porto Petro is the detail worth sitting with. Mallorca is where the packaged beach holiday was worked out in the 1950s and 60s, and where four families built the companies that took it to the Caribbean. Ikos arrived there in 2023 with a luxury version of the same idea, on an island that had spent sixty years being known for the affordable one. The format went out from Mallorca and came back changed.
Everything we read on Ikos
Where the company's own materials disagree with each other, we print both readings rather than choosing the tidier one.