Hôtel des Bains & Wellness

This is the review of an unpleasant experience with the Hotel des Bains & Wellness at the Lake of Robertville in Belgium which took place on November 2, 2024. What was planned as a two-night stay turned into a four-hour one. This was not due to the technical hitches and problems that came up, but to very unprofessional reactions by two members of the staff. My wife and I are retirees and experienced travellers. We currently hold the Ambassador status in the Bonvoy fidelity programme (at least 100 nights a year); we have collected more than a thousand and two hundred Bonvoy nights since joining the programme in 2010 and in the current year (2024) we have spent already more than 130 nights in hotels (Bonvoy and other hotels). We wanted to spend a couple of days in the Hautes Fagnes region of Belgium and we had booked a suite in the Hotel des Bains & Wellness of Robertville, a four-star hotel. We checked in at the hotel in the early afternoon of the 2nd of November 2024 and were given room 11, a very spacious room. We discovered that the television was not working (we wanted to watch the semi-finals of an important tennis tournament in Paris). The person at the reception tried to deal with the problem, could not find a solution and finally came up with another TV set. Unfortunately, the tennis tournament was shown on a channel which the hotel had not included in its subscription. These things happen. However, we discovered that the bathroom had a very large window giving on to a flat roof, with stairs leading to the higher floors. But the window was totally transparent with no curtains whatsoever. A lady told us that the curtains were under repair. We insisted on some sort of solution and a provisional cloth was finally fixed on the window. After a short nap, I tried to take a shower and discovered that the bathroom had only one light above the washbasin and that the shower area was almost in the dark. But the real problem was that the mechanism designed to send water either to the overhead showerhead or to the handheld one was broken. At the most, one could get a little bit of water from the handheld showerhead, but there was no way of preventing water from coming from the overhead one. My wife could not accept to be obliged to have wet hair every time she was taking a shower (usually twice a day). The person from the reception, a different one, came to the room, tried operating the shower but could not obtain more. However, he considered that this should have been enough. Faced with my disagreement, he said that he could not understand how we could have so many problems when the previous guests who had been in the same room had made no remarks. Very surprised by this unprofessional statement, I told him that since he felt that we were the problem, we would be leaving the next morning staying one night instead of two. When we went to the reception, the person explained our position and our decision to leave ear