Staying at Ersi Villas was a delight from start to finish. Elias was a brilliant host, always happy to help. First he kindly picked us up from the local bus station, and gave us an annotated map and ideas for what to do while on the island. He answered all our questions. At the end of our stay, Elias printed off our boarding passes, ordered us our very early taxi and even collected us from our room at 6am to see us off!

The hotel is lovely. While not on the coast like many villas, it is still very attractive with its small pool, plants and outside sitting areas. We loved the traditional cave house - it's quite small, a little dark and nothing fancy. But it was cute, clean and just what we were looking for. We wanted to stay in a traditional cave house, and this offered us an affordable way of doing so. Our room and the outside areas were cleaned every day.

The location was perfect for us. It's a short walk (up some steps) to the centre of Firostefani, where there are several restaurants and a couple of convenience stores and booking agencies. It offers beautiful views of the sea and the volcano, which can be enjoyed even more by continuing along the coastal path to Fira. Fira is about 20 minutes' walk by the coastal path or 10 minutes' walk along the road - we preferred the longer but far more pleasurable route. It was convenient for catching buses from the central Fira bus station.

There were very few low points, and they impacted us little. For me, the bed was too hard. We thought the breakfast was too simple to warrant the 5 euro per person price every day, so we opted to eat breakfast out instead. The pool is quite small and right by the breakfast tables, so it felt awkward to swim during breakfast hours. And due to it being a cave, we had to sit outside to use the wifi effectively - but we didn't really mind that.

All in all, we loved our stay at Ersi Villas traditional cave house and Elias was a brilliant host. We would definitely recommend it, especially as a lower-price but well-located option on expensive Santorini.