I had booked this hotel following a recommendation in the national press highlighting the less visited beaches around the UK coast; my wife being a huge fan of open water swimming and beaches in general. Sadly, as I was to find out, that was in March in the fervent hope that by July, and our anniversary, the restrictions that had curtailed many previous UK bookings would be sufficiently lifted. So the plethora of horror reviews weren't visible at that time. We arrived at around 3:00pm after a lovely restorative lunch at the nearby SeaChange Cafe; well after the advertised 2:00pm room access time. Suffered the same ignominy of other reviewers of searching an otherwise empty hotel to find someone to show us to our room. Went out the front to ring the bell several times, searched the restaurant area and other accessible points to no avail until around the fourth attempt we were seen to. The fact that the phone was visible with multiple flashes on the amber "message" light suggested we weren't being treated unusually. Same situation as other reviewers in that we were first asked to pay for the total cost of the room despite having paid a 50% deposit back in March via their own booking software!. To add insult to injury we showed the transaction record identifying the paid 50% amount and were then subject to a painful maths exercise of several goes at a calculator to divide the full amount by half to get the residual balance [which was patently obvious the same amount we had already paid]. Which somehow ended up different to our original payment? As the room was advertised as "including breakfast" I had enquired, at the time of booking in March, whether we could be afforded a vegan alternative to fit with our diet. Never received an answer. Emailed directly 4 weeks before our visit, again, to be told that a vegan breakfast would not be an issue. Reinforced that at the time of the tortuous booking in process. Unsurprisingly for the next morning's visit we were presented with the challenge of whether we wanted Black Pudding with our Full English! Reiterating for the fourth time our vegan diet we were then presented with the elements of the said Full English that were vaguely vegetable or fungal [Baked Beans, Mushrooms and tomatoes] with two slices of dry toast. Now, to be fair, we weren't expecting smashed avocado on granary preceded by overnight oats but with the level of emphasis and the current demand for plant based diets our expectations were certainly higher than the result. In consequence we left early the next day, avoiding the culinary delights of the day before, and enjoyed a fantastic spread of vegan breakfast scran in Durham on the way home. I had ,sadly, not investigated the hotel's food hygiene rating beforehand [that'll teach me to be trusting of national press reporting] and was mortified, later, to see a Chronicle report of 2020 showing a one-star Hygiene rating for the hotel. To the room then. The room, a "Suite", was large and well la