Guest User
June 13, 2024
Pleasant hotel with a beautifully-tended garden & fabulous views over the beach & Moray Firth towards the Black Isle opposite. Spent 3 nights in one of their Junior Suites on the top floor, which enjoyed the same lovely views. Tricky to photograph them, though, as the outside of the windows were spattered with salt spray & bird poo & the windows were fitted with safety locks so couldn't be opened fully. The staff were friendly, cheerful & professional, The dining room menu was decent enough, but no daily specials were ever offered. However the bar was able to supply my regular tipple (plain, unspiced tomato juice) which many hotels have been unable to provide in the past, so that was a definite plus. Most of the pre-arrival requests we'd made for our room had been supplied, but the jug of fresh milk for our mini-fridge was very small, only lasted our first night & wasn't replenished until I requested it again. The only clothing storage space was in the wardrobe & its shelves. One of those shelves was taken up by the safe & there was no drawer space elsewhere apart from 2 slim drawers in the dressing table. Even the bedside tables were simply large cupboards. Space which could have held a small chest of drawers or tallboy was either empty or contained a vast telescope on a tripod. We reported 3 problems in our room after our first night: 3 dead insects in the shower stall which were there on our arrival, a broken bedside table catch (on which I scratched myself) & a television which started suffering from severe digital reception problems after being on a short time. An engineer was sent up to deal with the TV, but although we were assured no other room had similar problems, our TV continued to suffer throughout our stay & its screen continued to flag the message that it was down to poor digital reception. The broken, sharp bedside table latch was never repaired & as for the 3 dead insects, they remained in our shower stall for our entire stay, despite daily reminders to reception - luckily, we prefer baths! Our final issue concerns the room safe. We're used to room safes where each resident inputs their own private code for the duration of their stay. However, the code for this safe was preset. Once we knew ours, it wasn't difficult to work out the codes for every other room safe in the hotel. And if we could work it out, so could everyone else. As a result, we didn't feel it was at all secure & didn't use it. Of course there's always the downstairs hotel safe option, but having once had my valuables stolen from the safe in a hotel manager's office we tend not to use that option either.