Turkish resort Hillside Beach Club is perfect for a luxury escape

The view from above at Hillside Beach Club.

I have what I like to call a Golden Retriever boyfriend. By this, I mean he’s not very good at sitting still and is always ready and waiting for the next activity.

For that reason, we’ve never really considered all-inclusive holidays, which in our heads were reserved for people who enjoy lying on the beach and not having to do much else. It didn’t take long looking at Hillside Beach Resort’s website for us to realise how wrong we had been though. We booked a four-night stay at the end of September.

Hillside Beach Club is in the Fethiye area of Turkey, on the south-west coast just over an hour’s drive from Dalaman. We had chosen to spend a few days in London before our trip, but you can get affordable direct flights from Glasgow and Edinburgh any time of year. We arrived around 8pm and were glad we had arranged transfers with the hotel in advance so there was someone there to collect us and take us right to Hillside. The check-in process was quick, a golf buggy was called to take us to our room and we fell right asleep.

While it is often not ideal arriving somewhere in the dark, the one thing I love about it is that you can wake up to a surprise in the morning – and that doesn’t even begin to do what we saw justice. As may be obvious from the name of the resort, Hillside Beach Club’s rooms are built up a hill surrounding an idyllic beach cove. Every room has the most beautiful view out to sea. We woke early, quite literally bounded out of bed onto our terrace and audibly gasped.

Our superior double room had a private terrace with a seating area and perfect view of the crystal clear water. There was one main bedroom with a huge walk-in wardrobe area as well as a smaller bedroom we didn’t use, but that would be handy for storage if you were there longer. The bathroom was right off the terrace, separated by a beaded curtain. A huge waterfall shower was kitted out with any products you might need. Our room was on the top level so there were a lot of stairs up to and down from it, but there are lifts dotted around so the resort it’s still accessible.

We had three full days at Hillside and were not short of options when it came to how to spend them. The whole resort runs through an app, so you can always look at what activities are on, make dinner reservations, order drinks to your sun-lounger or even book watersports lessons. There are free activities like cocktail making classes and beach volleyball, but also paid ones, so you can decide what suits you best.

There is a beach for everyone; the huge main beach with two bars, Silent Beach with sun-loungers suspended out on the water, Pasha Beach with perfect views of passing boats and Serenity Beach which is secluded a short walk or boat ride around the coast. The end of September was a prime time to go, with the temperature peaking at a still comfortable 28C and the resort bustling but not too busy. The water temperature was perfect and we spent the majority of our holiday doing exactly what I thought we wouldn’t: hopping between lounging and swimming.

When we did manage to pull ourselves from the water though, one of our highlights was a lesson on Hillside’s new padel courts. Padel combines elements of tennis and squash and, given that I am terrible at both, I was a little nervous ahead of our lesson. But our instructor was incredible, taking his time with each of us, tweaking our technique and also providing icy water and towels for our Scottish temperature tolerance. If we had been there for longer, we definitely would have booked more lessons so we could progress throughout our holiday and also try some of the other sports on offer like the very trendy pickleball.

If you like your food, you cannot go wrong at Hillside. The main restaurant turns into a buffet beyond your wildest dreams for breakfast, lunch and dinner. There are fresh pasta stations, more cheeses than I can name, pizza ovens, a fishmonger that grills right in front of you, rainbow-coloured salads and so much more. We had something different every time, experimenting with crepe toppings at breakfast, oozing burrata at lunch and gelato scoops at dinner.

You aren’t limited to the main restaurant either. We dined one night at Pasha, specialising in Mediterranean cuisine – and lots of it. Our favourite though was the Beach Bar & Restaurant which is an Italian delight. We were seated as close to the water as you could get without physically being in it, and the lights beneath the waves meant we could watch the fish as we ate.

Both Aidan and I are chronically bad at relaxing – our idea of a quiet weekend usually includes a to-do list as long as our arms outstretched and put together. But we both agreed something about Hillside Beach Club – whether it was the lazy swims or perfect pace of everything – chilled us out in a way we hadn’t in a long time. We had the option to do everything, or to do nothing and that was the beauty of it. I think holidays like this might just be the way forward.