Just attended a friends wedding at Thornton Hall in the Torrinton suite. Lovely day, brillant food and the staff during the meal were polite and freindly.
On our arrival, the receptionist was very helpful, allowing us to check into our room a little earlier than usual, even asking the cleaning staff to complete our rooms first as they had been occupied the previous evening. The lady at reception in the Spa was lovely and showed you to the changing rooms making you feel very welcome.
However, the room we stayed in was not of the standard I would of expected from a 'superior' hotel. There was no mini bar, the bathroom was grubby, the shower was rubbish (the showers in the Spa were great though, with lovely products to use) and it was so dark you had to have the lights on all the time - a bit of a nightmare when putting your make-up on for the actual wedding!!
The wedding itself was fantastic and everyone throughly enjoyed themselves until the bar closed and we headed to the so called '24 hour bar'. On arrival our non-residential friends were turned away by 4 bouncers - YES, that's what I said, BOUNCERS!! They were told to leave and that they couldn't go to our rooms with us either - bloody cheek! Then when the remaining residents were asked to produce our room cards, we got a lecture on why they weren't the right cards and it should be the card the room card came in...who's ever heard of that at a hotel?? One member of our party turned away in disgust at this request as he hadn't ever been told that we needed to do this, he headed towards the exit when one of the bouncers chased him, telling him to keep his opinions to himself in a completely agressive manner!! I just can't belive he ran after him! Can you believe this is a hotel we're talking about here and not a frigging VIP night club!! We did feel fairly threatened and the other bouncers were just laughing at us stood there in amazement.
They did let the rest of us into the bar after this, where it was closed. When we asked the man behind the bar why this was closed, he was really angry and confrontational. We stated that we were only asking the question as it's advertised at 24 hours and it wasn't unreasonable of us to do so, following which he calmed down a bit.
We were then 20mins later than the 11am check out time when we got a rude call from the receptionist telling us that we had to leave - unbelievable.
I have never experianced such aggression from night staff, the words customer service obviously do not feature in their vocabulary.
I will never go back to this hotel, although the only redeming feature was that some of the staff were nice. Just don't try and have a drink in the evening.