Upon arrival we saw the snow covered mountains and wondered if our hotel could really be that close to the main ski slopes...when the taxi turned into the drive we were therefore quite excited to see that indeed it could be!
We arrived pretty late and were greeted with a shot of lemon vodka, first impressions were excellent and I was thinking to myself, how can this place only be worth 3 stars, it looks so nice....however sadly from then on things got progressively worse.
Unfortunately, when I say they got worse, I mean straight away...as with many people in these modern times we begin to panic after a few hours without our precious internet connection, so it was a relief to get into our hotel...only to find the internet (wifi) didn't work :-(
We mentioned this of course, but given the time of day we weren't expecting a rapid solution!
The next day we tracked down the maintenance guy and impressively he actually brought a new router up to our room to ensure we had a good connection, so no complaints there! Sadly however outside our room we still struggled as the connection was very weak in other parts of the hotel, the restaurant especially (depending on where you sat).
Now, the internet aside (as I appreciate some may be less bothered by that than we were), the food was our next (and much larger) gripe....
I should stress that we opted for a half board package and unfortunately I would not recommend anyone does this. The portions were ridiculously small, the flavour was pretty poor (most but not quite all of the time), they completely ignored our dietary requirements, despite being told months in advance (and having rechecked this all, in Polish, so no excuse for a language barrier). Whilst they did, at short notice tend to come up with an alternative to certain dishes that I couldn't eat, it tended to be something along the lines of...bread...possibly with polish sausage, not really satisfactory!
It felt as if the hotel simply took our money and tried to cut every corner possible to increase their margins for package guests, which is not a good way to generate repeat business!
What I will say is that the a la carte menu was significantly better than the package, the portions were noticeably bigger and the dishes far more appetising, however by the end of our stay the limited menu had been exhausted, so it could do with perhaps 2-3 more dishes, or even a separate lunch/dinner menu for some variety.
Sadly, even though the a la carte was significantly better, the frequency they ran out of dishes was ridiculous, some days it was simply easier to list the 1-3 dishes that were actually available, rather than go through the vast majority of the menu that wasn't there (the bar also ran out of limes for 3 days, which greatly annoyed my Cuba Libre loving wife)! The kitchen also seemed to open randomly, rather than at consistent times throughout the day, which made planning meals in advance a bit of a lottery at times!
As for the service in the restaurant, sadly that was pretty poor most of the time too. I should stress that one young waiter in particular was very attentive and profusely apologised on multiple occasions about all the problems. The two young waitresses too were also relatively good, however the whole place was understaffed and simply couldn't cope.
Bizarrely we also got told off by one waiter because we ordered drinks from the wrong waiter...the problem was, seeing as no-one had asked us all evening if we wanted any drinks we had to go to the bar ourselves (its meant to be table service) and order at the til. It was therefore a bit of a mystery as to how we could we possibly have known who to order from and also even if we did, seeing as they hadn't asked us all night, what made him so sure they would actually turn up to serve us anyway!
Possibly my favourite issue of the week was the concept of splitting the bill, we often shared a table with people staying in other rooms (our choice, they didn't randomly allocate us to a shared table for clarity), however when we dared suggest we may want to split the bill it was as if we'd suggested Russian vodka was better than Polish vodka (i.e. the staff were not impressed). In fact, not only were they not impressed, they simply told us it wasn't possible, they wouldn't even do simple approximations, i.e. 50/50 splits, the bill could only be allocated against 1 room, which seems a bit ridiculous...given that we had enough computing power to send man to the moon in the 1960's, you would think a hotel in 2014 could perhaps account for guests sitting together and needing to split a bill across multiple rooms!
The main Christmas meal in Poland is on the 24th December, rather than the 25th and unfortunately this was a severe disappointment, we complained and did get given some complementary beer's, but my in-laws (the Polish side of the family) were less than impressed.
On the positive side, the New Year's meal was a pleasant surprise, even the moody waiter that told us off earlier in the week seemed chirpy and even came to replace our water when it ran out (a first for the week). The food was good, albeit once again they messed up the dietary requirements for the first course and the only real disappointment was that there were no soft drinks included in the package. To be fair we did suspect this to be the case in advance, so can't complain too much, but in Poland it is assumed that all soft drinks are included (generally) in New Year's packages, so that was a bit poor (yet another thing for management to consider adjusting for future years).
Just going back to the bar situation (which I briefly touched on with the limes), as I said earlier, the restaurant was understaffed and as the bar is in the same section, this too suffered, with no-one manning it most of the time. This meant it took ages to get a drink and was easier not to bother most of the time. This wouldn't be so bad if the waiting staff took drink orders at the table, but seeing as this never happened (I exaggerate, but only slightly), walking up to the bar and hoping someone would appear to attend to the mass of people fighting to get to the front was the only option.
So food and drink aside, what was the hotel like?
We had the deluxe room, which was a bit bigger than the others. A mountain view would have been nice, but I guess not everyone can get one and we drew the short straw, that can't be helped. The room itself was clean and the cleaning staff came round every day, so no complaints there. We had a fridge, unlike the cheaper rooms and although arguably we could have just used our balcony as a chiller, given the temperature outside, that was quite useful for keeping our baby milk in! The room didn't have a kettle however, which I think is fairly unusual (or maybe that's just an English thing?), I would expect most hotel room's to have one included.
The bathroom was big enough, clean and well ventilated, however (and this is a big personal gripe I have)...the shower was poor. The good news is that the hot water generally lasted (it came close to running out once, but not quite). However the flow was weak, meaning you had to stand right up against the wall to fully be under the water and even then there wasn't much power. Also the temperature kept fluctuating, presumably as other people in the hotel used the water. I'll admit that I am particularly picky about hotel shower's, poor one's bug me more than most, but that aside, this one was poor.
The bedroom was a decent size and had enough plugs for the multitude of electronic gadgets we now travel with, they also as promised had included the cot we requested (and baby bath, which was good too). However the double bed (as often seems to be the case in Poland) was 2 single beds pushed together...to be clear THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS A DOUBLE BED!!!! I'm not sure whether this is a Polish thing, as I have noticed it in a few Polish hotels and almost nowhere else in the world, but when I book a double room I expect a double bed, if I want 2 singles I'll book a twin.
My wife wanted me to point out that there were loads of kids running around quite loudly, making noise, however the hotel does bill itself as family friendly (and has a kid's room, which we didn't explore), so I felt this was less of an issue than she did, although its worth bearing in mind if you have low child tolerance levels!
There was no social area as such (i.e. sofa's), apart from the bar, which isn't the end of the world, but oddly they did have a pool table upstairs in the conference room. I would consider changing the layout to have a 'lounge' area and move the pool table there, as many people may not even have realised there was one, also what if people wanted to play when there was a business meeting on?
So overall, would I stay here again?
Unfortunately not as it stands, I'm not sure I quite captured the frustration I felt with this place, mainly because it has so much potential. The location is superb, bar Bania (the main hotel in the area) you could not ask for better and the exterior (and even interior for the main) was well presented and pleasant.
I really really hope the hotel management take the time to read these reviews and take the positives from them, yes I had criticised, but it was justified, please (if you do read this Mr Manager) take this on-board and make the changes you need to transform this into the venue it really should be.
This should be a 4* hotel, it has that much potential, sadly it is run like a 2* business with no-one listening to what the guests want.
I couldn't recommend this place to anyone at the moment, but if management were to respond to this review and commit to making some changes, if they could prove they had done so I would be tempted.
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