As we are focusing on hotels for our current survey, please do make sure you’ve been to our Survey page and given your feedback there! And by all means use this page to share your experiences of what hotels do that is good or bad!
Our latest experience was a four-star hotel in Seville. The first thing I got wrong was the location of our hotel. We read lots of guide books and web sites as always and noticed that when they talked about hotels, they were indicating how close each one is to the Giralda, the famous cathedral and focal point of Seville. We were pleased to see that the hotels we liked the look of would be close to the cathedral, the Alcazar and so many other famous Seville landmarks. What I forgot, of course, was that with cathedral comes BELL TOWER! And with bell tower comes, well, bell ringing! And not just ordinary bell ringing, oh no. This is serious bell ringing. Every quarter of an hour, one loud chime for the quarter-hour, two for the half-hour, three for … you get the gist. So, on the hour, four chimes – PLUS additional chimes to record the time for you, in case you happened to be asleep (no chance with those rock-hard beds keeping you awake). So at five in the morning, you get 4 chimes for the hour plus 5 more to tell you it’s 5am. This is so lovely! And yes, you had tried earlier to put the air-conditioning on to drown out the sound. And you freeze because the air-con thermostat doesn’t seem to adjust the temperature – it’s arctic, icy, ice-berg or ossified. This is holiday? Thankfully, Seville is beautiful but you need to think about hotel location if you are in any way sensitive to noise….