Grand Sapphire Hotel & Banqueting

nice service and nice experience

very nice stay

I am Sydel Walcott-Dhainy the person that booked the following on behalf of my family. We booked 2 family rooms, 1 single and a suite. where do I start: Two days before, I rang to enquire if there was on-site parking and was told yes, there is just pull up to the gate and press the buzzer. On the day we were all told we could not use the car park because they had a wedding using the car park. I arrived at 4 pm, check-in was allowable from 3 pm and we were told our rooms were not ready. No offer to compensate for this inconvenience. The single room was changed to a twin because that wasn't ready either. When I got to my room which was for 3 people, there were 2 bath towels and 1 hand towel. I had to ask house keeping to get us more towels. The rooms were pretty basic. there was minimal place to put any toiletries in the bathroom. The supplied toiletries only had shampoo and a couple of soap bars and the light above the mirror did not work. My sister had a suite and was told when checking-in that she had to leave a £100 deposit in case of damage (never heard of this in any other hotel, not even 5* hotels which we all have experienced) on top of that the room was nothing to write home about and for an executive suite did not even have a mirror in it. My brother was walking along the corridor and a ceiling tile fell and hit him, when he complained they had the audacity to say they needed to check the CCTV to make sure we did not interfere with it. All our key cards stopped working before the night was out and they could not resolve it blaming it on the technology, so we had to wait for the person on the front desk to come to each of our rooms to let us in with the master key after breakfast. Breakfast was also terrible and very limited, not enough staff, the hot food ran out and we had to wait for eggs, sausage, beans. As if they didn't know how many people were in the hotel. You had to fill a kettle and turn it on to make your tea or coffee which was all individual packages. At check out I complained and was apologised to, but told they would discuss it with the management to improve (doubt that would happen). It seems this hotel has dressed up the public areas to make it look professional and high value but beneath it all they lack customer service skills, not enough trained staff and generally don't care. This is definitely an overpriced con. I for one will not be spending my money here again. Stay here at your peril.