Guest User
June 23, 2024
Just returned from 10 nights at the beautiful Parc Gritti Hotel. PROS: We stayed in room 215 which overlooked the centre courtyard which was full of well cared for plants and water features, it was great. The room was really comfortable and well equipped with a good sized balcony. The hotel is very clean, a bit dated but it didn’t prove to be a problem. The pool is really nice with plenty of loungers, the inside pool is really nice as well. Bardolino is very close (walkable) and beautiful, a great boardwalk, an absolutely huge market on Thursday and it is very spacious unlike some of the towns on the lake, with a nice atmosphere, it was our favourite town along with Lazise, the most popular town is Simione, imagine Venice at midday in the middle of summer, it is packed! The ferries are great and good value, the buses though are very infrequent, either every 30 or 60 minutes and occasionally full. CONS: As said before in other reviews the food is awful, poor quality, luke warm, with a lack of decent variety, you travel to Italy to eat ITALIAN food, not goulash or Chinese chicken, the pasta was straight out a packet, the sauces looked like that, very little variety. Half way through we decided to change from half board to B&B so we could get some decent food in Bardolino, which we did. Breakfast was a joke with no logical layout, people walking around aimlessly looking for things like butter, breads, fruit, etc, the toasters were useless, the cooked breakfast is poor quality and sometimes cold. No one smiled, everyone looked as though they were going through the motions in a very poor buffet. The staff were mainly surly and ignored you and at times downright rude. They have two buffet restaurants for breakfast one closes at ten and they slowly set tables for the evening meal so limiting where you can sit, the layout of the second is totally different from the first. The Piano bar wasn’t open at any time. The Entertainment is poor. The TV just has BBC world to cater for UK guests, whereas other nationalities get loads of choice. They only have european sockets no USB ports. The entrance to the hotel doesn’t have a ramp to wheel your case up, only stairs and no porter. The lifts seem to be from the 60s and are very small. You can eat in the Grill which is supposed to be a la carte, which you have to book, they have a huge menu with about 80-100 items on it, what they don’t tell you is that if you on half board they give you a small menu with 12 items on it which never changes. They change rules daily, for example when we checked in no one ask us for a credit card, we charged drinks to our room with no problem, suddenly half way through the stay a board appeared saying you had to have the word Cashless stamped on you room card, without warning anyone, which resulted in me being rudely refused a drink in the bar. The hotel is fine probably not 4* but the food is 2* they really need to sort this out as soon as possible.