Wellness Hotel Stoos

Location - amazing. No cars allowed at the hotel, you park your car at the station below and there’s an amazing cable ride every 30 mins and it takes 5 mins to the top. 22 euros return each for adults. Service - strange. In the restaurant, some of the staff operate like a military bootcamp with “yes/no” and quite a lot of no. Also, weirdly, the second time we are there we were told we must sit at the same table. When we asked if we could sit somewhere else, even though the restaurant had so many free tables, we were told no, but we still did anyway and the waiter was cool with it. Food - very good. Breakfast tonnes of cool different local items and it seems everything is made fresh that day Front of house staff and housekeeping - excellent Pricing - quite high but the isolate location justifies it. Note that it’s expensive to get up and down the mountain so if you come, 2 or 3 nights is enough before you’ll want to go down the mountain. Overall it’s decent except for the weird restaurant staff vibe which is hard to explain.

This was I think our 5th visit to a hotel that has for years been a special place, a retreat for body and soul, holding many treasured memories of romantic weekends and family time when our girls were small. Perhaps that goes some way to explain why I feel so let down and disappointed. We booked spontaneously for a Friday night to escape the city, spend some child-free time together, lounging in the spa, chilling, reading and relaxing in the tranquility of Stoos. It was therefore a slight shock to discover ONLY upon on arrival, that the the hotel is hosting the local Schwingfest this weekend - directly within the hotel grounds. It would have been nice to be made aware of this when booking! We arrived to find the hotel grounds completely obliterated by scaffolding and staging, the spa area and hotel lawn entirely taken over and strewn with equipment and sand, and a swathe of chemical toilets replacing the usually stunning views. We were informed at check-in that the outdoor spa area/whirlpool would also be shut. What wasn't even mentioned at this point was that additionally two of the inside spa area saunas were out of commission and the whole glass-fronted (obligatory naked) spa area is fully overlooked by the army of workers building up the staging for Sunday. Nice. The full extent of the disruption we only discovered late evening, however by this time it was too late to leave - given that our car was by then only reachable by a cable car that had stopped for the night. We had actually repacked our bags before realising this - so infuriated were we - but we unpacked again and headed to dinner to try make the best of it. Unfortunately it was quickly evident that the table we had booked days ago was also 'missing in action'....After looking bewilderedly for the booking for some time, the restaurant manager eventually led us to a small table and deftly removed the name sign bearing someone else's name and hid it behind his back. Smooth. Not very welcoming though. The food was lovely - as it always is. However we skipped dessert, both feeling totally deflated and just wanting to get away from the hotel to enjoy a walk and the views from higher up in the village - untainted by the construction site around the hotel. To add insult to injury, we were told we had been spontaneously 'upgraded' to a better room. This turned out to be a first floor room overlooking... nothing. A mound of long grass and the service path for the hotel. Initially we considered this at least a saviour (although a totally cynical move given the lack of transparency at booking) as at least it was situated to the opposite side of the hotel from all the building up of the Schwingfest staging. Our relief was short-lived though when the clanking and hammering, shouting, swearing and revving of trucks and tractors for the building-up work started at 7am Saturday morning. I drew the curtains in my nightwear to be greeted by three dudes hammering poles into the grassy knoll, literal