Château De Pondres

The hotel is a stunning, well-restored medieval castle with beautiful gardens, and a lovely (unstaffed) pool. The restaurant staff were nice, the breakfast is good with a lot of local products. However, the experience does not meet 4-star standards. We stayed in two suites with a 3-year-old and a 4-month-old and faced many challenges: - No air conditioning in the biggest 3-bedroom suite, which was not only bizarre considering the price of the suite (and the fact we had to request for additional fans) and very uncomfortable given the warm weather (30 C / 90 F even at night) but also downright dangerous for our 4 months old baby. - The restaurant’s limited hours: room service orders have to be placed by 18:00, the kitchen closes at 20:30, there are no à la carte options, only a set 3-course menu. - Parking is poorly organized: the car park is pretty distant from reception, and there is no clear unloading area for incoming guests - and zero wayfinding. - Noise disturbances: leaf blowers started 08:25, and music at night in the chateau’s courtyard - Service was slow - resolving a simple issue required four separate conversations with the same staff member.

Just incredible to stay at this magnificent castle, with Versailles like gardens, pool, restaurant, spa. Feels and looks like a 5 star place. Just walking through the entire castle with reception room, arms room, dining room, and much more you can let your imagination go wild how the residents have enjoyed the property over its 1000 year history. We had room 11 which is a double room with 2 separate bedrooms and two bathrooms, amazing place.

Beautiful updated rooms, but unfortunately our visit was ruined by the fact that the property’s only restaurant is closed multiple nights a week with no restaurants walking distance and almost none within 20 minutes drive (we called three and two were closed, other had no service until 8:30pm, and a very mediocre menu at that). If you’re a hotel in a remote area and your restaurant is closed, it only makes sense that a small room service menu be provided, even if only small snacks like charcuterie, cheese, olives and salad. No food on site is pretty insane especially with families in mind.

An odd experience from start to finish. The chateau is accessed via a side road that passes through what appears to be the messy back of a farm and some low-quality houses. Upon arrival, we were upgraded to the external accommodation, and given rudimentary verbal directions to our room - but no map or information.||The room appeared to be new and well-appointed. We were surprised to find that the restaurant was closed Monday and Tuesday - which coincided with most of the restaurants in the nearby town also being closed!||We generally enjoyed our stay, but noted that the gardens were overgrown, untidy and had many weeds - although it appeared that the owners had recently spent a lot of money on a very substantial irrigation system.||At no stage did we feel welcome.||I would normally have rated the stay at 4 stars, however, the unauthorised and unexplained billing of my credit card following our stay left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.||The only possible explanation that I could dream up is that we were charged for the bottle of water that was in our room - which I assumed was complimentary (as was the case in all of the other hotels we stayed in) due to there being no price list or any other indication that a charge would be applied.

We were surprised that we could not eat dinner at the chateau on several (3) nights. Nor could we eat a some lunch times. A bit strange for a high class hotel. The breakfast was however excellent.

We had such a lovely stay at Chateau De Pondres! We felt very welcomed and comfortable, the food was delicious, our room was wonderful (such a comfy bed!!), and the property is gorgeous!

Beautiful chateau with exceptional grounds and very comfortable rooms! All our needs were met, though several member of the hotel staff (not all!) came across a little confrontational and frustrated with some of the other guests. This took away a little bit from the atmosphere and experience we would have expected from a 4* hospitality establishment. Thank you to the rest of the staff, especially Manon, who proved themselves professional and very welcoming!

We were somewhat disappointed that the room in the Chateau we had booked months before wasn’t available. Reception said this was because of a “ faulty shower”. Strange as that first night we were the only people in the hotel…surely they must have had another bedroom!|Anyway, we were told we were upgraded to one of the outside rooms in an annex purpose built. This room was fine…best described as functional…perfectly comfortable but pretty basic. |It was a very odd being the only guests in this large and magnificent hotel and odder still that there was no food whatsoever on a Tuesday evening….not even a nut in a bar. No choice but to go out!|People did start drifting in over the next couple of days…we had a good but quite expensive dinner in the hotel restaurant one night (€150) |The pool was in a nice situation but very cold. All in all it was a 3 star experience in a 5 star building.