Loch Shiel Hotel

The staff is friendly and accommodating, offering excellent service. Guests enjoy a delightful breakfast. The rooms are clean, comfortable, and well-equipped. The location is ideal for exploring the Scottish west coast.

Three weeks in advance we booked a deluxe room with double bed and loch views for our 52nd wedding anniversary. When we arrived the assistant manager spent an hour running around looking for keys, asking the staff if they were sleeping in any of the rooms and finally informed us that the only room they had available was a tiny attic room with two single beds above the smoking area for the hotel. The window had been left open so the room stank of cigarette smoke, the beds were hard and creaky and, although my husband and I are both quite small people, we had to turn sideways and ease around the door to get into the tiny shower room. The "amenities" consisted of two earl grey tea bags in a filthy box, two tiny thimbles of non-dairy milk and two broken biscuits. There was a double socket in the room with a four way, unswtitched extension which the television was plugged into but it was quite warm so we unplugged it. We didn't dare to use it. The food at this hotel was disgusting. We ordered the seafood platter. The waiter informed us that we couldn't order a starter because the platter was so large. We were bitterly disappointed to be served sadly defrosting prawns in a watery Marie Rose sauce, the cream and wine sauce for the mussels had curdled but about half of the mussels hadn't opened anyway. The whitebait were not the tiny, crispy morsels one might expect, instead the were a good three inches of bitter bones and fins. The langoustines were still frozen. The "artisanal bread basket" turned out to be two slices of under baked, bake-it-at-home baguette. We asked for a dessert menu but the waiter ignored us, looked at what what left on the table and said "I'll just leave you to that for a while". We actually went to bed hungry. We had booked and paid a huge amount of money (for us, it was supposed to be a special occasion) for two nights, we went home after the first one. We didn't stay for the breakfast.

A tight breakfast timing ! A little stressful . Lovely dinner staff though - forgiving when we were a bit late arriving after a long drive Deer in the garden !