Mitchell S.
Yelp
We were unfortunately let down by our peppers experience. We were excited in the lead up, the reviews on tripadvisor looked great, and I do like when a property respond to their reviews, but our experience was not consistent with all the positive things we read. I do note the irony in that this place wins awards for service. You can see my other reviews to know that I'm not typically a hard marker.
We are regular gold coast visitors, and like the broadbeach area. Part of the appeal of the hotel is its location and facilities. There were many positives, the rooms were large, very modern and new and well equipped, full kitchen, huge fridge, full laundry etc. If I can sum up the service it is that they seem to have been trained to be 'nice' and not actually know how to give service. Certainly not Five Star service. I noticed when booking through their website that there was some maintenance in some pools, essentially closing them, but this was due to be completed before we arrived. I also called the day before arrival mentioning I knew there was two towers and we are going up there for some swimming and sun, and asked about the pools in each tower and requested to be placed in the one which they said was slightly better.
When we arrived we were handed a note from 'body corporate' about maintenance, which we read at the room, and also got to our room to see we didnt have a twin room, which we had requested in the original booking, and they (voluntarily) confirmed when I spoke to them the day before arrival. We went back down to ask for the bed to be changed and they said 'oh you don't need to come down to request that, just give us a call' to which I mentioned we actually had already requested it twice. We also then mentioned that we were disappointed the pool would not be available for half of our stay, and could we move to, or use the other tower's pool. Which they said was not possible. When I mentioned that we called specifically about the pool, and had checked to see an update on the website (which was not there) there was only apologies. They told us we could use the beach, which she then acknowledged had been closed due to high seas lately. We were told there was nothing we they could do, how is this five star service? All we were wanting to do is use one of the major facilities people would want to use in the gold coast. The front desk member said they would speak to the assistant manager and I asked her to call us and tell us what was the response, and we never heard back.
The property also promoted Ipad use in the room, and in house movies. The iPad was never mentioned, and the movies did not work until we called to get that fixed, and then our TV system broke down as well. As you can see we probably had a less than great run of luck with certain things, but its times like this the service should make up for it. And here, it was nothing but pleasantries, just being nice is not good service. It would be fair to say we were annoyed during the stay and were then on the look out for other things, and noticed that during housekeeping, things like bedside tables would be left crooked or on weird angles, with some of the linen poorly tucked in.
On our next trip we are likely to go to the QT again, who understand and enjoy service.