letimcmanus
Google
My husband and I stayed at the hotel in early July. We took advantage of a special offer (pay for 2 nights, stay for 3), which worked out to be quite reasonable price-wise. ||||Overall, I was expecting and hoping to be impressed with the hotel, but that was not the case (maybe also because we had just come back from a week at the Four Seasons in Sharm el Sheikh, where the service was absolutely impeccable, which was not the case at the Alpengold). ||||Service - in particular - was a let-down. ||||The good part – room was nicely decorated; hotel looked nice and modern overall; nice location; breakfast and the other bits of food we had at the hotel restaurants were good; we enjoyed the spa and gym and the afternoon/evening drinks on the 10th floor on the Saturday when we were there; appreciated the advice of the male personal trainer at the gym, who noticed I was doing exercises for my leg following a bad accident and gave me some really useful pieces of advice. ||||The not so good elements: ||||- When I checked in, I was given a room which was double-adjacent (have never seen anything like this before, in any hotel, let alone a 5*). I asked for another, non-adjacent room but was told by the receptionist on duty on Fri Jul 4th in the afternoon that the hotel was full (which it was clearly not, judging by the fact that the hotel was definitely not busy at all). I was also assured by the same receptionist that the adjoining suite was empty for the duration of our stay, while the room on the other side had a single occupant for the duration of our stay, therefore we would not have noise disturbance from either side. Wrong. That was not the case. Both rooms on the left and right side of ours were occupied by families, and the noise from the suite when the entire family was close to the adjoining door was as if we had them in our room. ||||- The hotel offers free train station pick up and drop off (nice touch, if all ok). I booked that for my husband’s arrival. When my husband arrived by train from Zurich on Friday 4th at 8PM, the pick up service was nowhere to be seen. The hotel car was 15 min late (although it is only a 3 min drive from the hotel) and I had to come out of the spa and go to reception to see what had happened. We found that unacceptable in low season/a period of low occupancy, when I am quite sure they do not have to ferry people around every 5 minutes. Anyway, for my husband, on the way back to Zurich on Monday morning, we asked for a train station drop off at 6AM and we were told the hotel did not have available personnel to do that. ||||- Service at breakfast was very patchy. It looked like they had mainly trainees/apprentices doing the job, and they were trying to do their best, but you cannot have most of the breakfast service of a 5* hotel being left to apprentices. ||||- The gym and pools are very small compared to the size of the hotel (the gym is literally tiny). I dread to think what they both look like in the winter when the hotel has full occupancy and the price per night is at least 2-3 times higher… I do not understand why they did not build more extensive facilities when they clearly had the space. We found the pools to be nice and quiet early in the morning and then after 6PM, when the spa becomes adult-only. In between, we were shocked to see that entire families were allowed to play ball games in both the small indoor pool as well as in the jacuzzi kind of area outside. They were disturbing the other guests and no one from the hotel personnel was there to impose a bit of discipline and respect for the rest of the guests. ||Talking about the gym - I have never seen cheaper yoga mats than at the Alpengold at any other hotel I have stayed in. Literally, I think even Aldi and Lidl sell higher quality mats).||||- Last, but not least, we found the behaviour of the female spa receptionist on duty during the afternoon of Sunday, July 6th, absolutely unacceptable and incompatible with working for a 5* hotel. The website of the hotel does say that – on the day of check out – guests are only allowed to use the spa free of charge until 2PM. Fair enough. My husband and I were due to check out on Monday. After a nice walk, we went down to the spa at about 4PM on Sunday, dressed in our bathrobes, and as soon as the elevator door opened, the female receptionists pounced on us with an unfriendly “you have not checked out today, have you?”. We found that really offensive – assuming that 100% legitimate hotel guests – who were staying there that night - were sneaking into the spa beyond the 2PM limit… ||||- When I checked out on Monday Jul 7th around lunch time, although I was visibly limping (I actually had my crutches with me..), the receptionist on duty did not call the porters to help me with my suitcase, or tell me to take a seat until the porters were available (they were just finishing loading luggage in someone’s car); the porters saw me dragging my bag and did not say “please, wait a minute and we will help when we are done”. Nothing. So I ended up limping while dragging my own suitcase to the car and that was it.
