Burnside Hotel

Room, breakfast, location, staff. All excellent!

Nothing

The was a faint unpleasant smell in reception area and a very unpleasant smell by the lift on the 2nd floor

Really friendly and helpful staff at checkin. Lovely bedrooms - quiet, freshly decorated and spotlessly clan. The beds are very comfortable. Nice breakfast cooked to order, and a good late bar too.

£5 for overnight parking.

Good location and decent rooms and food.

The management were very rude. One of our six rooms had a flashing light that couldn’t be turned off so the couple requested to change rooms but the room they were moved to unfortunately had a very strong unpleasant smell. When they raised this issue they were told that was the spare room and there were no other options so we politely suggested that a partial refund on their room would be appropriate. This led to a forced phone call with the absent manager in the middle of our annual dinner, who was rude and aggressive and took no responsibility. Instead they threatened to charge us for an unrequested upgrade they had given us on a different room and even suggested we all find somewhere else to stay at 9.30pm. After this someone did actually arrive to fix the flashing bulb so the couple then moved back to the original room but our stay had been somewhat ruined by the very unpleasant phone call. The next day the hotel waived our £10 parking fee but offered no apology or compensation. Items were left by accident in one room and we hoped they might offer to send these on in the circumstances but they made it very clear that if we did not make a four hour round drive to collect them then they would be given to charity. This is the first time that we have had cause to complain in 12 years of this annual trip but unfortunately staying here was not an experience we can recommend. (Final note - the hotel repeatedly claimed that the unpleasant smell in the bedroom was just curry cooking in the kitchen below and when we pointed out it had a strong smell of damp not cooking they replied that they would appoint a damp contractor to assess the room and if he did not find evidence of damp then we would be billed for his fee of up to £500! This is not a reasonable way to deal with customers you have given a sub standard room for £165 for the night)