As any regular visitor to this site knows, I have been away in Sligo for near on the last three weeks. I have to say I have never been in a more scenic, beautiful looking place in Ireland, especially the drive north, some really breath-taking scenery, going through the mountains. the town itself is quite nice, although notorious difficult to drive around, due to the many dead-ends and one way system. I was also quite surprised about how really genuinely "nice" the people there actually are. unfortunately I was warned that they weren't very nice at all, well, to whoever said that obviously haven't stayed there, they are wrong!
On my first day of arriving I was a struck by the fact that it started raining immediately after I went over the border, this is due, apparently, to the fact that Sligo itself is between two mountains, so it rains most of the time. Anywho, I arrived at the appointed hotel. "Hmm, I thought, looks clean, spotless in fact", so I thought, this is going to be nice! Oh, how wrong I was!
This is how the first conversation went as I approached reception!
"Hello there, I'm booked into this hotel for a couple of weeks with "(company name)", my name is blah, blah, blah", I said with a smile!
"Tut", said this sour-faced whinge-bag,"How many of there are you?", rather abruptly!
"I have no idea exactly how many are staying from the company"
"No I mean how many are here from Waterford"
"3", I said, "one guy's arriving later and another on Monday"
"Tut, so you're not all here together then?",
"No, why, is that a problem?"
"No, just very inconvenient"
ALARM BELLS!
So after about an hour waiting I eventually got my keys. Nice room, spotless again, can't fault that.
I was thinking when I started writing this that I would go through every little incident of pure down right ignorance of the staff in this hotel, but to be honest, there are just TOO many, so here's a quick overview:
1. The Guinness is total shite, so much so that I had to switch to Heineken, which was shite.
2. When the barman pulls a pint and the head is too big, get this, he uses a fucking beer-mat to scoop off the head.
3. There's a Portuguese/Spanish guy working behind the bar who insulted nearly EVERY SINGLE PERSON HE SERVED, purely because his demeanour is just pig-ignorant.
4.If you ask for something, at the bar, you can be damn sure you'll get the opposite
5.I was in the toilet quite a few times where the staff from the bar were in there, never washed hands, in fact my Spanish friend spent at least 5 minutes fingering is oh so perfect hair and then went back behind the bar!!!
6.They'll give you your main meal before your finished your soup!
7.They let non-residents run riot along the corridors at night, and if you make the slightest noise, they're down on you like a ton of bricks
8.They Hoover around your feet while your eating (this didn't happen to me but it did happen a colleague)
9.They treat their cleaning staff like absolute shit, a rather abusive conversation was over heard in the corridors in the early hours of the morning, about someone being 5 minutes late.
10.They leave all the rooms open when they cleaning your room, and will leave it unattended.
11.The kitchen has never heard of sour cream, they brought out a bowl of whipped cream, who the fuck eats whipped cream with a sandwich???????????
12.They also never apparently heard of sweet chilli sauce, they tried to pass off some salsa with a bit of chilli powder in it to me!
13.One night, a waitress just pointed out our table to us, at the other side of the room, didn't bring us to it!
14.They refused to give room-service one night, even a sandwich, and it says that it was available on the brochure in the room, their reason was it was a bank holiday, what kind of hotel cuts back it's services on the busiest weekends?
15.Some eastern European sour faced twat pushed me out of the way when I reached over to get my own cup for coffee one morning, and did it again a few days later at night when I didn't hear her say excuse me!
16.They insisted on giving us the "el-cheapo" set menu every night in the restaurant (an A4 photo copy, inserted into the fucking wine menu!!!)We had to ask for the "proper" menu every time, obviously they were assuming that because we were on business that we weren't going to spend much!
I could go on forever about this, because there is a lot more, and my fingers are tired now, so I'll leave on this note.
The people who run this hotel may think that we were an annoying, pedantic bunch who looked for things all of the time, but at the end of the day all of these things are the things you would expect from a 3 star hotel. We shouldn't of asked for anything!
I will say though, that there was a few good people in there though, who did try their absolute best, the elderly night porter was a lovely guy altogether, the barman who's fond of ice-cream and the the lovely lady who I seemed to scare the shit out of everytime I talked to her. I'd love to include names but they know who they are and I sincerily hope that they see this some day!
THE END
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