Family beach holiday with interest

This is my first return to Travellerspoint in several years and needs have changed as we now have kids in tow!.

I am thinking ahead to a trip in summer 2025. Kids will be 9 & 12.

We are looking for suggestions for great beach holiday locations. We like to be close to a good beach (white sand ideally) but also in or within walking distance to a nice town with lots of bars, restaurants ideally with a traditional feel. Accommodation could be a good self catering options or a hotel. Pool essential. We normally rent a car to spend a day or 2 checking out the vicinity.

We will fly from Ireland so we may not have easy access to some Greek islands for example but most airports should be accessible.

Aiming for a 10-14day trip.

We have been to places like Calpe on Spanish Costa Blanca which was great as lots to see in the vicinity. We recently returned from Kalamaki in Zakynthos - Greece, whilst the hotel and the island are lovely, there was not much in Kalamaki and the beach is not great.

Suggestions really welcome.

I'm not a beach person - water yes, but I dont like sitting on sand. Boring.

It looks like you are concentrating on European destinations. So I guess my 'expertise' in white sand beaches in the USA isn't relevant. When you said "white sand" I immediately thought of the Florida Gulf Coast where the sand is so white it looks like snow. But maybe not.

The only experience I have with European beaches is a long time ago when I was in Marseilles and the beach was mostly pebbles, so not sand and not white. But some of the towns on the Amalfi coast of Italy looked nice.

My grandson's SO recently rented a house with a pool on the northwest coast of Costa Rica. The Pacific beaches there are nice and she's very frugal so it would probably not be too expensive. I don't remember what town they were in, but I could ask.

Would you consider the Caribbean? Barbados has some nice beaches - depending on the ages of your children - the west coast beaches are calm with some big hotels (maybe expensive), the south coast is a little more lively, and the east coast has surfing down near Bathsheba.

The Virgin islands also has some beautiful beaches - there's at least one hotel in Cruz Bay, St. John which has a pool and beach and is in walking distance of the town. I stayed in that area many years ago and we walked to town for dinner every night, before we chartered a sailboat.

St. Maartin has a beach right in town and many nice hotels or you could stay on the French side of the island.

If you are looking abouot a beach-holiday with sandy beach in Europe than you'd look at Italian Adria, from Cesenatico to Cattolica or for Spain around Lloret de mar or more south from Denia to Benidorm. But all of this destinations are crowded in high season, so you have to decide and to book early.

If you want to be in Europe, BeateR's suggestions look good to me. The only other places I can think of in Europe are maybe Scily or Majorca or someplace like the Canary Islands, but I have not been there so I don't know.

If you widen your area a bit you might consider Bermuda which has lovely 'pink' sand beaches and several hotels which have pools and are beachfront. If you stayed at the Hamilton Princess (where we stayed on our 2nd visit), it is walking distance to many stores and restaurants and attractions in town. And there is a good pubic transportation system of buses and ferries - since the only cars you can rent are tiny two passenger electric cars. I have been to Bermuda 8 times and have not done everything that there is to do. It is expensive - you haven't given any budget requests.

The other places where I have observed (but not stayed in) hotels that are beachfront with pools are Grand Bahama Island in the Lucaya area. The area near the Bell Channel Inn had lots of shops and restaurants when we were there on our boat. Some of the places have kitchens

In Cozumel a lot of the beachfront hotels with pools are A/I which I don't care for. When we were there we stayed in a hotel in San Miguel which had a pool but no beach. We were primarily there for the diving - we took a taxi out to the dive shop each morning and had breakfast out there and then took a taxi back to town in the evening and walked around town and ate in different restaurants after the cruise ship people had left. There are apartments that can be rented. Cozumel is a nice little town in the evening.

My daughter went to a hotel on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica (possibly in Quepos) and they did things like waterfall rapelling and tubing and other kinds of outdoor activities. In August of 2015, we stayed in the San Bada hotel next to the Manuel Antonio park and it had several pools but I don't think it had a beach. The town was quite nice.
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