“The cottage was beautifully furnished, warm and comfortable but the lack of housekeeping stock and the ‘house rules’ did not give an overall welcoming feeling of relaxation or luxury holiday.”
For example - no detergent for the washing machine (in the countryside, wet muddy walks, in winter?), peppermill was empty, torch batteries flat or low, no spare toilet rolls, single small discs of packet soap in bathrooms with no refills, a single replacement bin liner only, outside shed bulb not working. As a pet friendly cottage, comments such as ‘Obviously dogs are not allowed upstairs or on the furniture’ and ‘there must be NO evidence of dogs left in the property on vacating’ feel quite disrespectful to guests and assumes the worst of them. The 9am checkout is early and difficult to rationalise particularly when the guest is expected to do most of the tidying. To be packed up, beds stripped, house ordered, had breakfast and on your way, under the threat of leaving not a single dog hair, by 9am on the final morning makes your last day a very early start and/or takes up much of the previous evening. Things like this detract from what could have been a really enjoyable and relaxing stay. Whilst we appreciate all prices have increased, the cost for ensuring usable items are well stocked and refilled should be a reasonable inclusion to the overall cost. The cottage is not cheap and for this tariff, we really would not expect to feel penny pinched and unfortunately it engenders a degree of dissatisfaction. Initial supply of logs is as stated in the description, but again, refills require a car journey to stock up and in our experience cottages of this cost and marketed as luxury would have extra logs on site and available.
The village pub is excellent and well worth returning to, the location is good for local attractions, walking from the door is good if without wanting to let your dogs off lead but requires walking across a lot of sheep fields or the road to get to better dog suitable walks.
Overall a very lovely property but not the luxury relaxed holiday ambience we were anticipating. Lots of positives but definitely some areas to reflect on to improve the user experience or expectations
It was rather disappointing to have received this review as the vast majority of our guests have positively commented about the warmth of the welcome they receive at Boxtree.
We feel that Boxtree is very well equipped with the details of how guests can access all the necessary housekeeping arrangements as these are clearly outlined within the welcome pack.
Whilst we welcome four-legged friends it is obviously necessary for us to set out the applicable house rules in order to ensure that the cottage can be maintained at a very high standard for the benefit of all our guests – we do not think we are unusual in this respect.
We have taken onboard the comments regarding our current checkout arrangements and we have therefore now reverted to a 10am checkout.
Property Owner
