Hotel la Brunerie

When I booked back in Nov-21 the reviews were all glowing but the recent reviews in Feb-22 filled me with a sense of foreboding! I booked with Iglu/Crystal & couldn’t fault Viktoria the Crystal rep. One of the previous reviewers said she was elusive. We had the opposite experience. She was in the hotel when she said she would be & was super helpful. The ski locker room is inside the hotel, through the main reception. Sure the fancy swipe card locks didn’t work but let’s not over dramatise, your skis & boots aren’t really at risk. There are much easier ways of stealing skis if you want to than carting them through a hotel lobby. Our hotel room (318) did also have some mildew on the ceiling, & one of the bathroom downlights wasn’t fixed in the ceiling properly but I have seen rooms much much worse than this. The room was spacious & well heated, with plenty of hot water. The safe didn’t work initially but the receptionist did manage to fix it with the master key on day 2. The staff were slightly Fawlty Towers’esque. (One of the front desk staff never took his coat off. Maybe he was cold? Even stayed on when doing an impromptu Covid pass check in the restaurant one night. Leaving in one wired airpod earpiece for good measure too - think Crockett/Tubbs crossed with Mission Impossible). I tried to converse with the staff in my schoolboy broken French & they didn’t understand a single word. By my own admission I’m not great at French, but I can normally get by. They didn’t understand a word - because they were all Italian with zero French. Weird. Breakfast was OK, we only ate cereals / continental bread & cheese. The hot alternatives looked pretty insipid. The quantity of food at dinner was never an issue for us, nor anyone else I spoke to during the week. There was an English dinner menu on display in the lobby - but the translation was terrible. French version was a lot more representative of the actual food. The dinners looked like they had been thrown together with whatever was in the kitchen at the time. Some really strange flavour & ingredient combinations. One main course being x2 Bratwurst type sausages with onions. Not amazing. Overall it seemed a bit like a hotel run by people who had never run a hotel before. We probably wouldn’t go back.

Honestly? The hotel reeked of cigarettes, I was there on a school trip with a school I won't name. But I got sick from inhaling the cigarette smoke. We had small single beds in tiny rooms. The thing for adjusting the temperature didn't work either and it was either too hot or too cold the entire time. Now this might have been the hotel directly across from it but they are identical buildings and are under the same name.

If there was an option for no score then I would have chosen that so unfortunately I have to give them a 1! On arrival we were Allocated a room on the third floor with black mould on the ceiling! The start of things to come! Breakfast served til 9.30 but if you are down around 9am be prepared for cold scraps! Although a Crystal holiday we haven’t seen or heard from a Crystal representative, so you are left with unhelpful and miserable looking staff! If you want a towel change, you need to pay 5 euros for the privilege and don’t expect a bedding change either! Evening meals are gross so we ate out the 7 nights we stayed! Plus no gluten free options. Also if you are looking for 50 year old adults that are going through mid life crisis that want to slam doors and party in their rooms then this is the place for you! Again uninterested in resolving any complaints. More like a cheap hostel than a hotel. Just wish there was room at the Aalborg hotel for our stay!