Review of Van der Valk Hotel Brussels Airport

4 years ago

Where do I start?

Where do I start?

I had the "luxury" of staying at this hotel about a month ago when my Delta flight to Atlanta was delayed for four hours, and then cancelled altogether. The staff here was horrendous. They were rude, condescending, and frankly did not care about whether our needs were met.

I get that this hotel was not expecting around 150 disappointed people to stay overnight that morning. Upon leaving the airport, we were promised three meals (lunch, dinner, and breakfast), and drinks all included for the inconvenience. When we arrived at the hotel, we were completely lied to about lunch, and had to deal with the rude check in staff.

A couple hours later, let's call it two-so at about 6:00 PM, the power at the hotel goes off (I understand that the hotel is not to blame). Our vouchers for dinner say that we have to eat inside, but since the lobby was quite hot, the majority of the people from the plane ate outside (since it was about 75 F). An employee of the hotel spoke at us quite condescendingly in French to "eat inside and follow basic instructions." Unbeknownst to him, one person by us was fluent in French and chirped back something equally as condescending.

Like I had written earlier, Delta gave us on our voucher-drinks for our stay. It was a printed out sheet saying that we could have complementary drinks that evening. A handful of the bartenders (like four or five) decided that they wanted to "cut us off" at three per person for the night, and they wanted to decide what we could and could not get. No, no, no. That did not happen. Finally, a person who I assume was the bar's manager could see that the sheet of paper did not say a finite number, but capped it at three per trip up.

All in all, I do not think that I would recommend this hotel to really anyone. I do my best to watch to see how people react to a situation like this, the Van der Valk Hotel handled it absolutely horribly. No one was polite at all, no one went out of their way to see if people needed anything. If I didn't have to give a star rating, I would not have given y'all one. This hotel was that bad.