We've just returned from our week's holiday at the Sport Hotel after seeing the advert on Mumsnet and I thought others might be interested to hear how it was.
The hotel itself was fantastic, the food was fabulous and plentiful, the staff were extremely helpful and very friendly, the facilities were excellent and the scenery outstanding.
Here's the but. We chose to splash out on this hotel because of the promises of childcare provisions which would ensure our children "had a wonderful time" whilst DH and I had some quality time together. Unfortunately this was not the case. Although they had the facilities - 2 purpose built rooms with soft play and toys galore for the different age groups plus theatre and cinema and planned activities during each day, many of the staff were not able to converse in English and did not actively play with the children when they could see a child was bored or becoming upset. Consequently mine and my friends children who we went on this holiday with (we had two 2 years olds and two 5 year olds between us) found it very difficult to settle without us being there with them. In the older children's club we had to ask the staff a few times to speak in English as well as German when they were explaining something or giving instructions as all the english speaking children didn't know what was going to happen and this made our children nervous.
Normally our kids are all very independent and confident as they attend nursery or school and so are used to mixing with other children. Consequently, they were not able to enjoy the facilities available to them without having one of us present at all times which of course meant that both DH and I and our friends couldn't go on the hikes or use the other facilities as we'd planned as we basically had our children with us most of the day.
In the mini-club (0 to 3), although the staff seemed friendly enough, only one spoke english to a degree that the children could understand. This meant that when our children, and other english speaking children, were upset only one was able to speak to them in english. This resulted in the staff contacting the parents within a couple of minutes of a child becoming upset and more or less asking them to be taken out of the club. And on one day when we counted 17 children for two members of staff We didn't even bother trying to leave our children at the club that morning!
We did raise these issues with the person in charge of the children's clubs and she did make suggestions to the try to overcome the problems but we did notice throughout our stay on the few times that we did have our children in the club that both ours and other english speaking children felt left out a lot of the time.
We're all disappointed with how it turned out. Don't get me wrong, we had a great time but we all went with the belief that this hotel catered for English speaking families and had excellent childcare facilities which just wasn't the case.
Anyway, we're about to write to the owners of the hotel (it's part of a franchise) to see if they will offer us some sort of compensation in addition to highlighting the problems we experienced.
If any of you are interested I'll let you know what they say.