Vesting Hotel Naarden

Great friendly staff and a great location.

One of my pet hates is the assumption that everyone has and is willing and able to use a smartphone to perform functions perfectly well served by reliable lower tech solutions. I thought restaurants which provide only QR codes stuck to tables instead of a proper paper or chalkboard menu were bad enough, and then I checked in at Hotel Vesting. On checking in, I was told that to get into my room, they would send me an e-mail which I would then have to open and then click on and slide on links in the e-mail and wave my phone by my bedroom door to open it. Not everyone has a smartphone and even if they do, they either might not work, or might be out of battery, or might not have (expensive) roaming enabled. My own phone was misbehaving during my trip to Holland (refusing to allow me to make calls or send SMS). The last thing you want checking in after a long day's travel, when the phone battery might be running low, is to be told that you need to rely on your phone having enough battery life for you to get back into the building or your room late at night. To his credit, after my grumbles, the young man who checked me in went away and found a key ring with a large metal key and some sort of key card (referring to a different hotel name) that I was able to use to get into my room instead of having to rely on my phone. While he claimed that people lose or forget key cards and metal keys (and yes, I once spent an afternoon in a Sicilian post office queue to post a metal key back to a guesthouse when I found it in my bag), every other Dutch hotel I stayed in provided key cards. Hotel Vesting could save money by providing slightly less posh toiletries than Aesop brand if the cost of replacing lost key cards was really an issue! I can only imagine how my 80 year old mother would have reacted if told she had to fiddle around with an e-mail on a smartphone to get into her hotel room. My 2nd floor room (under the eaves) was spacious but a bit minmalist (style over substance). The bed was comfy there was a decent walk in shower, large flatscreen tv, and interesting herbal teas with the kettle. However apart from the tiniest of wardrobes, the bottom of which was taken up with a safe for valuables, there was nowhere to unpack your clothes. There was space in the room for a chest of drawers. There were 2 steps between the bed level and bathroom level - beware if sharing a room with your partner, don't just think you can blunder to the bathroom in the night without putting a light on in case you forget the steps are there. Downstairs the bar/dining area was interestingly modernised, in what is an old building. I enjoyed my sea bass dinner, and the food prices were not as expensive as I expected (in what is not a cheap country for eating out). At breakfast, I suspect they brought me breakfast for 2 - the portion was more than I could eat (2 little glass kilner jars of yogurt, 2 croissants and 2 of each kind of bread roll) as well as scrambled eggs,

luxurious hotel in the middle of picturesque fortress town.nice restaurant great breakfast

I've come here for coffees and meals plenty of times, and my husband and I and two kids decided to take friends here. The service staff was so rude this time around - we were thoroughly disappointed. They have a few toys for kids, but we were instructed that they weren't allowed to play in the area the toys were stored, we weren't offered an alternative spot either. Why have kids toys if they're not allowed to be played with? Worse still, they had three big lanterns with real candles in them, on the floor! I moved them around the corner so my young kids wouldn't burn them selves/drop toys in there. The service staff rudely moved them back into the kids space, without even announcing it. I'm glad I noticed just in time. When I asked if I could put them up high on the table for the remainder of the 20-30 minutes we were intending to be there (and I even offered to put them back in the right spot after) - we were rudely told no. A very disappointing experience this time around. I'll be thinking twice before bringing guests here again, or even visiting myself.