CLC Duchally Country Estate
Terrible
My husband & I booked an overnight stay for our anniversary directly on the Duchally website. We opted for the dinner, bed & breakfast tariff & were looking forward to a relaxing break. I’m 6 months pregnant so wanted to enjoy a final break before the arrival of our little one.
The road leading to the resort is single track & not well signposted. On arrival, it’s not clear where to go & the car parking area is very tight with delivery lorries coming & going.
Having been very impressed by the pictures of the resort online, we were very disappointed by the mediocre, cramped & unkempt presentation of the hotel. Check in was straight forward & we were shown to our room, number 12.
Our bed was a double mattress placed on top of two single bed bases. The headboards were screwed into the wall & stuck out beyond the bed leaving a massive gap at the back. The mattress was also sagging in the middle. Not ideal for a pregnant woman looking for a good sleep!!
Then there was the view, the smell & the heat! The room was stuffy so we did what anyone else would do & opened the windows. Straight away the room filled with a smell I can’t begin to describe. There were bottle bins at the rear too so that meant the smell coming in was accompanied by wasps… The view was of a shed, bottle bins & the staff smoking area. Lovely. So much for the garden and mountain views described on Duchally’s misleading website.
On asking to change our room, we were told the only other room was number 11 next door. We went away for a walk & decided to request a change to 11 on our return. I went back to the room to sort our belongings leaving my husband to deal with the simple request. He spoke with a female manager at reception who claimed there were no bins near our room & she had never heard of anyone complaining about this before. She may as well have called him a liar. By that time room, 11 had been booked & her solution was to give us air freshener before passing the buck to the receptionist to phone us & apologise. At that point, our bags were packed ready to go home. It really was that bad!
Thankfully the duty manager, Steven, who took over had the decency to come up to the room & check the issues we had highlighted. Something that the previous manager had point blank refused to do. He agreed that the bed was unsuitable & there was a smell in the room.
He requested that we go for dinner & allow him to look into a solution. He came to us & advised he had a show lodge which did have some boxes stored in it, but he was willing to show us it & move us into it should it be suitable.
We moved to the lodge & were very grateful to Steven for going above & beyond to help us.
Sadly we were left with a sour taste in our mouths (& a black hair in my husband’s starter) so the whole trip was tainted. An issue which could have been fixed much earlier took over 6 hours & we left feeling more tired & stressed than when we arrived!
We paid a decent amount of money for our stay but received shocking customer service from the female manager who was clearly ready to head home for the night. Whilst I did not expect any special treatment, I had noted on our reservation that the stay was to celebrate our wedding anniversary.
A sad, expensive way to spend a ruined anniversary! The one star I have given is purely for the duty manager, Steven who picked up the slack for someone who was very rude & uninterested!