I want to give a balanced review, so starting with the good points: the property is beautiful and in a fantastic location.
The bad points: after booking this trip back in February, we were told a few weeks before our holiday there would be no electricity or water at the lodge for one of the days (8am until 5pm) of our stay.
Understandably this caused quite a bit of trouble and worry for us - we had 5 adults and a newborn in our party, so it was quite stressful to plan a day around not having access to the basic services of electricity or running water. In addition to not having lighting/being able to cook/make a cup of tea/shower/flush the loo, we were also unable to use the other facilities paid for (e.g. the lovely hot tub!) and were quite worried that the food in the fridge and freezer would spoil during the power cut (including expressed milk for my 2 month old son).
I would have cancelled the trip and rebooked somewhere else, however, with us being told of this problem a few weeks before our stay there really wasn’t much in the way of alternative accommodation available – so the alternative would have been to cancel our holiday, our first with our new son, which we had been looking forward to since the beginning of the year.
Despite the inconvenience and worry of not having access to water and electricity while on holiday (with a baby), no refund was initially offered by Nicky for the day we lost at the lodge. After being asked about this, she has only offered to refund £21 – scaling the refund to cover the hours when the electricity/water were unavailable despite no provision to having been made to tell us when the power was switched back on, although, it is not clear if even this amount will be refunded as I was told that ‘that does not cover my cost for the new cool bag, bucket and water that I specially purchased for you.’ – which was missing the point somewhat about the problem, as these items shouldn’t have been necessary if everything was working – I would have rather had running water and a working fridge!. We were also told, in relation to this problem, ‘It is inconvenient for you as well as myself.’, which was a bit odd, as we were paying guests…