TLDR: This place is a combination of potential and bad attitude from the staff / ownership. They are serving extremely expired food - moldy, stale, whatever - and are vindictive and willing to lie.
The property is a large house in a cul-de-sac in a quite residential neighborhood. We arrived on a rainy afternoon, parked in one of the spaces in the driveway, and as soon as we got out of the car there was a guy coming out from the side gate swearing because he had just slipped on the debris in the side yard, and advised us to be careful.
We went inside and checked in for our 3-night stay (Weds, Thurs, Fri nights). The place is cute and has a nice little cafe set up in the dining area. There isn't anywhere comfortable to sit if you want to spend some time reading or such, though - only the dining tables.
When we got checked in and upstairs, I discovered that I had made an error during booking - this was a shared bathroom. Oops, not my first choice. The room was a standard suburban kids' room size with a queen bed, pretty cramped. There was a non-working portable heat pump in the room (didn't give warm or cold air, only blew and was noisy). Fortunately the central heating was sufficient. A cute touch was the glow-in-the-dark stars painted on the ceiling.
Wednesday evening, things were looking good, the WiFi worked well, we were able to do a remote meeting. The sink in the shared bathroom smelled bad and didn't drain, and I texted to let them know about the issue. A prompt resolution was promised.
Thursday morning... it fell apart. The breakfast on offer makes a nice visual spread but was, it turns out, basically inedible. I pulled a yogurt cup out of the refrigerator that was about 5 months past its "best by" date (which I didn't notice at first). When I opened it, it smelled really strongly sour. The blueberries at the bottom were grey. And it tasted awful. I threw that away, which is when I noticed the expiration.
I next opened another (sealed) container of yogurt, only two months past its date. The yogurt was fine, but I made the mistake of adding some cereal from one of the dispensers on the counter. The cereal was horribly stale with a very unpleasant texture. Next I tried one of the chocolate donut bars on offer. Also extremely stale.
We went about our day, disappointed. Sometime that day, I posted a two-star review on Google, with no content - just stars, which they responded to very rapidly and somewhat sarcastically. When we got back, she talked to us about our experience so far. We talked about the unexpected shared bathroom, and I was clear that it was my fault on that one. We also talked about the inedible food on offer. In that conversation, she offered us the larger bedroom with the en-suite bath. We accepted that offer, believing it was an attempt to help a dissatisfied customer. We were about halfway through moving our stuff when she came back and asked how we wanted to pay for the upgrade.
More discussion ensued, where we shared our assumption that this had been a comp. She said she'd have to go ask the owner. A few minutes later, we were OKed to be in the larger room, and finished moving our stuff.
Somewhere in this conversation, we mentioned that we had seen a review including information about the extremely stale food, and that we didn't think it could be that bad. She first said that the stale / expired food hadn't been put out (...so why are you keeping expired food at all?) and then that we shouldn't complain because "the breakfast is complementary".
In extremely convenient timing for them, just as were settling in, she returned and told us that the bigger room had just been booked, and we would have to move back to our original room. It turned out that this statement was a pure lie - nobody used the room the next two days.
Additionally, after this set of events, the WiFi suddenly became extremely unreliable, giving errors that our devices weren't authorized. MAC address randomization worked to get them back on the network, but was inconvenient having to reset regularly.
Thursday evening (after we were told that they had another guest coming) we received a text asking if we would be eating there (no), so they wouldn't have to put out their breakfast spread, already putting the lie to the other booking. We did indeed decline breakfast (shockingly).
The smelly non-draining bathroom sink? Still didn't drain. I let her know, but it wasn't fixed during our stay.
Saturday morning, the breakfast was back out - there was another booking, but he had stayed in the downstairs area. The same deli meats that we had seen sitting out on the counter for 3 hours on Thursday morning were back out on the counter, the same stale donut bars, etc. My wife observed moldy berries in a container in the fridge.
It could be so much more here, but they don't seem to want to fix it. read more
