lonesometravellerGB
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Positive Aspects||||Excellent rooms for twin (self+wife) and single for grand-daughter, overlooking the restaurant terrace of this small village hotel - about six letting rooms, I think.||Free wi-fi worked well, though we only tried it in the two bedrooms.||Staff spoke some English, and coped adequately with my poor French at times!||Had dinner in the hotel (in the excellent restaurant one evening, and on the terrace another evening); both taken from a shorter and cheaper menu (for hotel guests only) - an excellent idea, we thought. The hotel's main menu attracts many diners and some very good reviews, but seemed rather more complex and expensive than we needed, so the 'hotel guests' menu worked well for us. The kitchen was exceptionally helpful with ensuring 'gluten-free' dishes for one of us, even supplying GF bread unasked as an 'amuse bouche' - great customer-service, folks!||Less than five minutes walk from 'La Chiesaz' very small railway station, but that IS up a steepish hill so, on arrival with a heavy case, NOT an easy pull up to the hotel for these older guests! ||Accommodation providers in the ‘Montreux Riviera’ area (Google it) provide a 'Riviera Card' free on arrival, and that is good for lots of local travel throughout the booked accommodation period. Free bus and train travel - so there is often NO need to buy tickets at all by showing the card if requested = 'hop on, hop off' really, often to well up the hills/mountains (though NOT to the very tops), but the top sections also discounted at 50% using the card, as are the lake cruises. Many local attractions also discounted, some as much as 50% using the same card. ||Oh, in case you thought is really IS a 'free lunch', it is funded from the 'Three Swiss Francs per person, per night’ 'local tax' collected by your accommodation providers - but still a good value deal - about £60 for a week for three of us, and we travelled a lot using it in what is an expensive travel area, so economical, too!||||Less Good Aspects||||The bedrooms were very hot indeed for the first four nights, and requests to borrow fans was met with "No, sorry - we have none", so perhaps the owners should do a deal with the electrician across the road and lend or rent them out to guests for the hot summer nights.||The church bell(s) were weird, chiming once to mark the hour (and some other intervals), but then 'tolling' the number of the hour five minutes AFTER the hour.........strange, and ceaseless, too!||Road traffic;although this IS a village hotel, it is on a bend on a busy main road between the lake/Vevey and the main area town Blonay, with traffic heavy both mornings and evenings, and quite late into the (very hot) nights, so open windows were necessary. Especially noisy are the little 'wasp' scooters run around by the younger teenage riders, but they did go to bed eventually.||Overall, this was a very good stay in a very pleasant spotlessly-clean small hotel run by nice people - thank you to Emilie and Julien - merci beacoup !!
