Hotel & Spa Chariclea

There is a huge disconnect at this hotel between the "promise" and the "reality" It's clear that the owners spent a lot of money on the renovations - the rooms look brand new, the restaurant interior is well-furnished and the spa area is also expensively appointed. What however was utterly lacking during our stay was even a modicum of customer service. On arrival, I was made to feel extremely unwelcome - as a UK national living in Jersey, the receptionist was asking questions like, "Why doesn't your address country match your passport?" as though nobody ever lived outside their country of birth. She made a meal of copying out the details by hand, instead of taking a photo of my passport to enter the details later. This check-in took maybe 20 mins. I nearly walked out. The room was nice, but as soon as we arrived we noticed it hadn't been prepared for our arrival - there was for example no toilet paper! Because there was no guide attached to the phone, this involved another trip downstairs to the unhelpful front desk. Later problems with the room included it not being serviced on more than one occasion, even though we were careful to put the sign outside to tell them when we were not in residence. In Czech (at this hotel at least) it seems everthing is for the convenience of the staff, not the guests. We thus often didn't have fresh towels. The spa was quite bizarre, too. In what one might imagine to be a fairly serene, relaxing environment, why did the staff need to use extremely noisy floor polishing equipment every 15 minutes? There were ordinary floor mops present that would have done just as good a job of drying the floor - but even when there were no other guests present, this process occurred. It made us have distinctly mixed feelings about visiting the pool area, even though that was the main reason we'd originally booked this hotel. The health treatments were, in and of themselves, good and well delivered by the central staff, although there is a distinctly post-Communist feeling to the area where some of the treatments takes place, with pipes pinging and bonging with the fizzy water and a generally draughty environment that lacks the serenity of a top-class spa. I don't know how disabled people would cope with this hotel since although there's a lift and the internal walkways have slopes, I didn't see a wheelchair slope up to the main entrance so how would they get in? For a therapeutic centre this seems like an oversight. The restaurant was quite hilarious. The buffet that's available to guests that have pre-booked meals looks like something I haven't seen since my school days - stainless steel boxes without a hint of finesse. Again not really what I was expecting from the hotel that's supposedly at the top of the "food chain" in Podebrady. Furthermore, the staff were studious in their avoidance of eye contact or indeed any form of contact with the guests. On one occasion when I was trying to order drinks, there were four waitr