Giethoorn Old Art Hotel

The hotel was sparse and bare bones when it comes to customer service. It’s a totally electronic check in! We wanted a few extra towels and there was no one to request them from. Price was overpriced for such a bare bones hotel. They did have some charm with the doors painted like famous Dutch artists. The restaurant provided a complimentary breakfast for hotel staying guests. Free parking across the street from the hotel.

It was just a so/so experience. Easy to reach by car, big parking in front. We got two rooms, same price, one notably smaller than the other, no real window, just a roof window. The place looks good, wooden floors, no frills but pleasant. In our room however, which was the bigger and nicer one (with window), there is no reading light on the bed side, so there are only two choices, either be blended by the light spots built in the ceiling or total dark. How can you have a room in our days with no side lights on the bed? So if you are two people in the room, one wants to read and one wants to sleep, no way. No electric plugs near the bed either so if you want to charge your phone and check it while in bed, no way. I found the bed to be quite uncomfortable. The mattress is made by foam, kind of cheap thick foam, and it folds up on the sides when sitting on it. It is quite soft, for me too soft. The bed is placed against a wall which is a roof wall, so it is not straight but leaning, which means you cannot sit on the bed, you can just lay down. There is also no headboard for the bed. So, if you want to for example write something on your iPad and you cannot sit on the bed comfortably, there should be some desk….there is one chair in the room, but no desk, so the only way is to sit on the side of the bed without leaning with your back anywhere. I wonder if the people in charge of renovating and running the structure did ever try to stay a while here to find out what is the real thing they are offering to their guests and how uncomfortable the rooms are. Last thing, the cleaning: our rooms were apparently clean as they should be. However in one of our rooms we found a whole croissant under a bed which means the cleaning is not as accurate between a guest and the other as it should be.

The staff were not much knowledgeable. We are tourists who visit the place from different countries who know nothing of the place. It was stated that the place offers bikes / boats on rent. We tried asking one of the staff there and they knew nothing of the services. The check in is automated and we have to communicate over chat for knowing about the details about room and services. There is no front desk reception available. The checkout time was 10:00 and when we asked a staff, we were told that it was 11:00 (it is my mistake also, I could have asked the chat service or could have checked the details). But at the location, from a staff, we were told this info), and based on that we made our plan to visit the nearby areas. We reached the property at 10:10 and to out amazement, we found that we could not enter the room as it has number lock and we were locked outside. Since there is no front desk, we communicated over chat and were told that our check out time had passed and that is why we are locked outside. I offered to pay one more day's money since our luggage was locked inside to which they agreed - over chat. Since we were told that we can use the room for one more day, we went on site seeing and reached the property by 11:45 so that we can take our luggage and leave on the bus at 12:15. We made the payment for one more day at the auto check in machine as agreed earlier and were about to enter the room. Before entering, we were surprised to see our luggage kept outside the room. We contacted the customer care again and demanded the money back as we did not need the room. We paid since our luggage was inside the room. But they threw our luggage outside and all of this happened due to their staff's misinformation only. We haven't used our room at all. We tried all sorts of ways to convince them to refund our money, to which they denied. The room and food were good, but this horrible experience make us rate the property poor.