Mallory D.
Yelp
I do not recommend this hotel to foreigners. The concierge and other staff have extremely poor communication skills, and from what I can tell they seem to feel very justified in passive aggressive rudeness over simple and straightforward communication. On top of that, our rooms didn't stand up to the hype. Our party of five was placed in three of the four rooms available in the gate house, which is furthest from the main facilities. When you book, please don't let them place you here. The building really needs updated. The plumbing is cumbersome, many of the doors in the building won't shut, some of the lights don't work, one of the three rooms did not have a fridge for some reason, and the wifi only worked for a few cumulative hours during the entire three days we stayed. When it was working, it was extremely slow. We had to call the reception desk and ask for someone to be sent up to reset the router, but the receptionist was very rude, impatient, and dismissive on the phone. When we went to the restaurant for dinner the first night, we were seated in one of the sitting rooms instead of the main dining hall, and had to eat from the couches at tiny coffee tables. We noticed that no one else had been seated this way and we were confused, but we all just shrugged and didn't think anything of it at first. However, the next morning we were seated in the dinner hall away from the rest of the guests for breakfast, and they even closed the room's door on us. For both occasions the staff spent a lot of time watching us, but barely spoke to us, and I quickly felt like an animal being watched in a zoo. Well, that evening one of our party called the restaurant to ask for room service, and the person answering just HUNG UP on him without saying a single word. Looking at the room's information packet about the hotel, we found that we are supposed to call the reception desk to ask for room service from the restaurant, but not to call the restaurant directly. The staff on the phone could have just SAID that we needed to call the other number, there was absolutely no need to just hang up on us. A simple "You've called the wrong number, you need to phone reception" would have been perfectly fine. That was also when we noticed in the information packet that the restaurant has a dress code. This hotel has been our third stop in seven days of travel. We still have two weeks to go. We have been dressed in clothes comfortable for being constantly on the move from flight, to train, to car, to another train, and so on and so forth. We realized that our traveling clothes are probably the reason that we were seated so uncomfortably when we went to eat at the restaurant, but I am absolutely flabbergasted that no one simply SAID anything. If someone had just approached us and said "excuse me, but you should know that there is a dress code at the restaurant" instead of all this shuffling and unexplained passive aggressive hostility, then we wouldn't have had a problem. Instead, the increasing and unexplained rudeness whenever we spoke with the reception about our accommodations was extremely stressful and disheartening. It made the other smaller issues (such as the wifi not working) more difficult to tolerate, because we were aware that the people answering the phones would be very short and angry with us whenever we called for anything. And we wouldn't have needed to call for much of anything if we hadn't been placed in the house such a distance from the rest of the facility! The one of us who first called for room service ended up walking two miles back to town to eat there, and was told by a local restaurant worker that those who stay in this hotel often end up eating elsewhere.
