geoffl822
Google
This was probably the worst hotel experience that I've had in decades. My wife and I were in Lynmouth for a shanty event and our room was included in a block booking.||Problems started with the check-in process. I was somewhat bewildered to find the Reception desk empty and a notice that asked me to ring a non-existent bell. I eventually found the bar, where the barman told me I needed to check in at the Rising Sun. At the Rising Sun, I still couldn't check in because the staff had mixed up invoices/bookings and were unable to determine the balance I needed to pay. The person who had made the block booking had to attend to attempt to resolve the issue. I wasn't privy to the ensuing conversation, but my friend returned after a while, handed me my room key and told me the balance payable. I attempted to pay that balance on three occasions before succeeding as nobody was available who could process my payment on the first two attempts. I doubt that I've met with such a convoluted and inconvenient check-in procedure.||Once I had my room key, we dropped off our luggage to our room and returned to the shanty event, retiring to our room at about 11:00pm looking forward to a decent shower and a good night's sleep: but that didn't happen...|- The shower unit was temperamental and it took several attempts before the shower stayed on.|- The shower drain was blocked and I soon found myself paddling in over an inch of soapy water.|- The bedside lamps didn't work as they were not plugged into the wall sockets. The bedside cabinets (which seemed part of the headboard, and so could not be moved) were too close to the sockets to allow the lamps to be plugged in and so we ended up using our phones as torches.|- The bed was incredibly uncomfortable -- hard and lumpy, with something that might have been a broken bedspring. We had almost no sleep and both my wife and I had backache by the morning.||Our sleepless night was purgatory and, had the reception been manned, we'd have probably checked out in the middle of the night rather than spend another minute in that room. We ended up handing our key back to the Rising Sun at 7:30.||Then, to add insult to injury, My friend who made the block booking later emailed me to say that they'd charged him the balance for my room -- the balance that I'd already paid the night before. Thankfully, I'd insisted on them giving me a receipt for my card payment, which I scanned and emailed back to my friend, who should now have proof they'd overcharged him and so be able to claim a refund.||We may be back for next year's shanty event ... but there's less chance than a snowball has in Hell that we'll be staying at either the Rock House or the Rising Sun.
