We've been staying in The Gibson Hotel for many ye...

We've been staying in The Gibson Hotel for many years. Regularly but not very often as we considered it an expensive treat. We always found it more than lived up to its 4 star rating in that there was always a great attention to detail and we never left dissatisfied. Until our stay on 8th February 2020. This time, there were only 2 real positives and they were a waiter in the restaurant, Alesandro (not sure if spelling correctly) from Italy, and the online check-in/checkout.

I upgraded to a suite which I expect means a separate bedroom. There was only one room and a bathroom. I could not get the air conditioning to heat up properly. The lock on the bathroom door was broken meaning we could not lock it. There was only one mirror with a plug near it for a hairdryer. Some genius had decided to park a standard lamp right in front it, but, when I went to move it, I discovered that the bulb fitting was broken in that it was separated from the upright pole.

The upgrade included Sky Movies and Sky Sports, but, when I tried to put on a movie, it looked for a 4 digit password which we had not been told. I called reception and they gave me a password which did not work.

I chose the option of prepaying for dinner because there was small discount. On the morning of our stay, I called the hotel to make a dinner reservation. I was told by the restaurant that it was booked out until 7.30pm, so, I made a reservation for two for 7.30pm. When we arrived at the restaurant, we tried to tell the person at the desk that we had booked and prepaid, but, she literally did not even acknowledge what we said and proceeded to seat us as if we had no reservation. In fact, I'm now not sure that the restaurant was booked until 7.30pm as there were many empty tables when we arrived.

When I sat down at the table, I realised that this person has seated us between a number of dirty tables. There was one table to my right which was dirty and there were 4 tables to my left also dirty. Indeed, I looked over my shoulder and there were two big tables also uncleared. One of the waitresses heard me say this to my wife and immediately began cleaning the tables, but, firstly did not clean them properly and secondly did not set them up with crockery and cutlery.

A waitress then came to our table with bread. She just plonked the bread basket down on our table without saying a word and without asking us if we wanted bread, which we did not. It was clear to us that this bread basket had been picked up from another table. My wife decided to try a piece and it was awful. The basket was so carelessly presented that two of the bread pieces were upside down.

A waitress came to our table to take our order which we have to her. She asked if we wanted something to drink (other than water) which we did, but, she didn't wait for our answer. So, we had to get another waiter's attention to order wine. My wife ordered a glass of red and I ordered a glass of white. But, when the white came, it was tepid and clearly had not been chilled. It didn't taste great, but, I put that down to it not being chilled. I called the waitress and told her that the wine was warm. I asked her for ice but expected her to offer me a chilled replacement. She didn't and putting ice into it did not solve the problem of it tasting poor. So, I gave it back. I was then asked if I wanted a replacement, but, I declined. Thankfully, we ended up with a guy called Alesandro serving us for the rest of the evening.

The breakfast food was fine, but, I couldn't believe it when we were standing waiting to be seated, the person doing the seating walked away and I saw her enter the kitchen and come out with teapots in her hands. But, we were lucky that there were only 4 people ahead of us when we arrived because, when were leaving, there was a queue of at least 20 people waiting to be seated. Clearly way understaffed.

Overall it felt like there was a change of management which had caused a major deterioration in quality and in attention to detail. We wont be returning.