JonnyBoy_GLA
June 25, 2024
On the positive side, this hotel is in a great location and has a lot of charm. Nice bar with seating in the sun during good weather. Food was pretty good and not terribly expensive for Dublin prices (although rooms were pretty pricey). However there were some issues. We travelled for an event at RDS arena (hotel is on route from Dublin centre) and was therefore quite busy on day two of our stay. We stayed two nights and the day before the event, the service was fine. However when things got busy on the day of the event some of the staff didn't cope well, showing visible signs of stress which they took out on the customers a little. This came to a head when my wife waited for 10 minutes to get served at the bar with staff ignoring her in favour of others coming in way after we got there and being served ahead of her, even though she was clearly there before them. Seems the staff just couldn't be bothered to try and serve customers in turn and just took orders from the more "assertive" guests. This was also commented on by another female guest stood next to my wife also waiting. In the end we just walked out the bar and went up to our room where our only option was to drink tap water. This event was known about months in advance and given the hotels location it was obviously going to be busy. Adding some extra staff for that night would have kept service levels up. Maybe the labour market is really tough in Dublin and this was difficult to do or were they being tight? Another issues was the inability of the receptionist to check us out when we wanted to leave at 6am for our early flight (despite me warning on check in the time we would be leaving). This seemed to be due to the computer system going through its "audit cycle" at that time. I think the person that initiated this had been on a night shift, so not sure why this couldn't have been done this in the middle of the night. Again a little foresight to the number of guests and possibility of early flights could have avoided this. Overall I had pushed the boat out a bit for a good hotel to make our visit a bit more special. These issues did take the shine off a bit and I'll probably look elsewhere for my next trip to Dublin.