David Drury

Review of Hotel Splendid Excelsior- Lago...

We checked in looking for four relaxing nights at ...

We checked in looking for four relaxing nights at the end of a busy five weeks touring around Europe prior to our twenty four hour journey home. We had a reasonably pleasant lake-view room with which we were initially very happy. But what we hadn't counted on was the live music outside our window until midnight (management claimed until 11:30). We got an apology and an assurance from management that it was on Saturday night only and there would be no more during the week. On Monday night the music came from the bar next door just across the street and still outside the window. When we complained that there was still music the answer was that it wasn't our music and by the way it would be on again tonight!! If we were thirty we might be out there enjoying it but as the whole point of our stay in Belaggio was to relax this was totally unacceptable. We demanded and finally got a room change -accepting a pokey little room much smaller and nowhere near the quality of the room we had paid for.
The hotel is a bit tatty; if everything else about the place was OK you might be able to see this as part of a quaint character but it is rather indicative of a hotel that just can't get things right. Our new room has an air conditioner that rattles so much as to be unusable and a sloping ceiling which means you have to duck your head in some areas - particularly the bathroom. WiFi is intermittent at best but usually nonexistent and the promised English-speaking TV channels are unavailable. As for the breakfast offerings they are quite meagre and unappetizing.
During this trip we have stayed in hotels in Austria, Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. All have been excellent; none as disappointing as Hotel Excelsior Splendide - surely a deliberately ironic name.