We spent a week on Crete at the Grecotel Creta Palace. They had great food and really seemed to cater to families. Kids under 12 eat free and the kids can just go get a dish of ice cream any time of day at the restaurant by the pool. They had just completed a brand new water park with a lot of (what I feel to be) really fast, scary slides.
They also had entertainment most evenings, mostly for kids, but this one group of acrobats from Zanzibar was very entertaining.
The kids disco was not nearly as good as we've seen at other hotels. They played the same songs every night and there were no "extras" like costumes or fun characters or a stage-like setting. The Grecotel Amirandes had a really great kids disco with a stage, fun lights, and more fun songs including some current ones with extra free dancing at the end, and we expected it to be as good here but it definitely was not. That being said, the kids club here was much better than then one at the Amirandes with more kids, many more hours, more activities, etc so you win some you lose some.
The beach is really nice, very walkable for quite a ways in both directions. We were not allowed to swim in the ocean for the entire week due to rough waves so no idea what it's like if you actually enter the ocean but walking along the beach was really nice.
We spent a day wandering around Rethymno and it's filled with neat, well-tended alleyways and tons of shopping and restaurants. We needed more time there but there isn't much for a 7-year-old to do while her parents endlessly walk and shop. There is a little red train you can take on a tour around the town which we would have done if we could have relied on the weather being dry for a few hours.
Some stormy beach. By the end of the hurricane-like storm, the ocean was brown almost as far out as the eye could see from dredging up all the sediment. It takes at least a few days after the storm ends before it all settles back out and it's blue again.
