Now from one extreme to another, from a 3* hotel in Italy with stunning views over Lake Como to a 4* hotel on the Isle of Arran that has ideas way above what it manages to achieve with prices far in excess of its value, in fact a basic 3* city centre hotel with very average food though I would add that breakfast was excellent.

So why this tirade some of you may ask. Well it always annoys me when a product, whatever it may be, fails and fails miserably, to live up to promises made on its website and I am afraid that Auchranie failed us on almost all levels except breakfast. We arrived on Friday, fresh from our journey over from the mainland on the Calmac ferry. A well presented young man on reception, Graham, made us very welcome and explained the hotel and its services exceptionally well, showed us to our room and in general was what you would have expected from a 4* hotel. The room was small but very well furnished and comfortable. We had not booked for dinner until we had taken the opportunity of having a look around the hotel and its 3 restaurants though only 2 were in the main hotel while the third was over in the new spa building which was mainly for families with small children. The two restaurants in the hotel to choose from were either opulent fine dining (their words not mine) in the eighteen 69 or the alternative was new Brambles Seafood and Grill. We opted for the latter being our first night and Faye went back along to reception where Graham booked us a nice table for 2 by the window for 8.30. At 8.30 we duly presented ourselves to the waitress only to be taken to a table in the middle of the restaurant and not as we were promised the window table, which was now occupied by another couple who had entered just before us. When this mistake was queried our waitress passed the blame onto reception, however as Faye pointed out she did see Graham allocate the table to us on his online seating plan! Rather than turf another couple out of their seats we resigned ourselves to the nether regions of the room and ordered a couple of bottles of water while we perused the wine and food menus. Now we are not a hard couple to miss, me at 6’5” and pony tail while Faye scales in at 5’1” and is a ringer for Micheline Connery (she has been mistaken several time in hotels including Gleneagles) however it would seem that for some reason the Harry Potter cloak of invisibility had been cast over our table for after 20 minutes nobody had come close to us while service was being given to other tables arriving after us. Indeed we may still have been there at closing time had I not decided enough was enough and headed to the bar with my ‘not a happy client’ face on. The barman (wine water?) was full of empty, meaningless apologies but we ordered our wine, most important, and our meal. Now I am no wine expert, though I do love a nice Riesling, but even I know that the only reason to offer the man/host to taste the newly opened bottle is simply to check if the wine has been ‘corked’ in the bottle not really necessary when it’s a screw top though! A small but an important fact I feel but now onto our meal, Faye opted for the chowder, well this is chowder ‘not as we know it’ in fact the best and perhaps only way to describe this bowl of liquid nothingness would be if you could imagine a simple stock and then add to that a packet of the mixed seafood you can pick off the shelf of any supermarket. Tasteless, watery insipid, well simply wrong she left most of it. Now to my choice which was described on the menu, and I quote; ‘try our Famous chunky fish cakes’ @ £5.75. Well the first problem is with the description of the dish in the plural because its one fish cake and as for chunky well my cake was obviously suffering from a severe case of malnutrition, I have seen, and tasted better fish cakes from our local fishmonger. So that was round one, round two was a much better experience as we had opted for the seafood platter for 2. Excellent, soft moist mussels, wonderful langoustines, very tasty mackerel pate served with warm bread and some home poached salmon. The only disappointment, and this is personal taste, was the marinated monkfish, which I felt, was a tad tough. We skipped desert and the double espresso, which I ordered was a good blend.
A couple of observational remarks about Brambles while its still fresh in my mind, firstly the wooden tables reminded me of a motorway café and ours came complete with that ‘sticky touchy’ effect but it would so enhance to whole look of the restaurant if the tables were covered in simple white tablecloths. And my final point would be why oh why in the middle of some of Scotland’s finest and grandest scenery is the wall décor some ineffectual meaningful pieces of abstract hotel art. Yes I know that there are some stunning black and white images in the eighteen 69 restaurant, but it seems such a waste of an opportunity for promoting the very area you are selling to your clients.

Back to our room where we discovered that the television reception on was bad, shaky screen, double image, not what you want when you are watching Tom Watson heading for glory however we stayed with it and reminded ourselves to mention it to reception the following morning.
On the subject of the room a couple of minor issues which I did not expect to have with a 4* hotel, the first there is no WiFi access in the hotel bedroom which was unusual, though I was able to us my BT dongle to connect and the second problem really surprised me. In my experience, and we do stay in many, many hotels throughout the year if you are in a ground floor room and we all know how warm and oppressive hotel bedrooms can be, its normal to be able to open your windows using a security lock, in other words you can have your window ajar at night allowing fresh air to flow through the room while not worrying about being attacked or robbed during the night. Not the case at Auchranie I am afraid you have 2 options, either close the window and breath stale air all night long or open the window and then spend the next 8 hours lying on your back awake wondering if you are about to be joined by someone from outside to share the room. But never fear dear reader as the best or worst is yet to come because the following morning I headed into the ensuite bathroom to avail myself of the ‘shower over the bath’ facilities and here again I must ask why, with reasonable head room, British hotels seem to be of the universal opinion that all guests are the standard Scottish height of 5’ 10”. Now I know I am above average height at 6’ 5” but the shower only came to my lower chest so bath yoga is involved in shampooing, but that was not my main concern, no my concern was firstly with the area around the taps in the bath, thick with a horrible, sticky black mould, this had not been cleaned for months, possibly years. I then checked the overflow of the wash hand basin and yes, here as well, black, horrible and possibly harbouring many germs. When I eventually gathered my courage and stepped into the bath, taking care not to go to near the taps, I noticed the extractor fan above, and to the left of the showerhead. Now again perhaps nobody of my height had ever stood and had a look at the extractor fan, if they had they would have fled because, like the taps directly beneath the extractor this had not been cleaned, possible since it was originally installed all I can say is that I was confronted by a dark, thick, furry sight that speeded up my showering process enormously, wondering was there Legionnaires disease hovering up there. I did report this to reception and when we returned later and collected our key I was left a note from somebody informing me, well actually he addressed the note to Room 16 rather than taking the time to check who was actually staying in the room, that the tap area had been cleaned. However not the overflow or the fan so they are still lurking in room 16. Oh, one final remark on the bedrooms, if indeed you do wish to go to AUCHRANIE then please do ask for a second floor bedroom as the floors/ceilings are so thin you can hear almost everything from walking over the floor, doors closing, drawers opening and closing and loos flushing. You have been warned!

When we returned to the hotel that evening we realised that Brambles was closed to host the wedding reception and that our remaining options was either a dose of fine dining or popping over to the Spa and mixing it with the kids which for me is not an attractive proposition. So we opted for eighteen 69 and some fine dining only to discover that the first table would not be available until 9.30pm not their fault. So, we opted for room service as the menu is from the same restaurant and that brought the time forward to an 8.30 service and lo and behold at 8.30 room service arrived. Well perhaps that’s overstating the matter slightly, we had ordered a starter each, the taste of which I cannot recall, and for main we both went for the 21-day steaks, one medium rare and one medium, with a side order of mushrooms and potatoes, English and French mustard. What arrived were the steaks, however, no steak knives, no salt and pepper, no mushrooms and no mustard. After much coming and going we got most of our order though by the time the mushrooms arrived the steaks were all but cold and we still never got the knives. But the most disappointing aspect were the steaks, when you make great statements on your menu about how your meat is sourced and how long it is hung for then your client is positively salivating at the thought of a beautifully cooked, tender moist steak only to be confronted by a tough, chewy piece of meat that should never have been sent from the kitchen. Faye left most of hers while I managed one of the two pieces before my jaws gave out on me and I succumbed also. The desert was a dark chocolate soufflé, which was acceptable and at least managed to take the taste of the steak from our mouths.
I must say that one redeeming feature is the breakfasts, which are excellent, and the poached eggs are superb.

So in conclusion you may gather my reader that this was not one of our more enjoyable excursions away from home, a deep, deep disappointment and as I mentioned at the start of the entry perhaps the worst 4* hotel we have ever stayed in and never to be repeated however the wedding was most enjoyable and that was what we were there for after all.

PS. I always delay posting for 24 hours after I have written anything to allow me time to reflect but one thing suddenly has become clear, especially now having read other reviews of this hotel on other sites, is that our experience is not an isolated event! However when we left I explained all of our complaints and concerns to the receptionist, the duty manager being unavailable at that time, and I am sure that he would have passed on our comments seeing how upset and frustrated we were on departure. However, although the hotel has our email address, we have received no contact to find out how our complaints could be addressed. Seems from other comments online that burying its head in the sand and ignoring us is not unusual for Auchrannie. Perhaps a call to the North Ayrshire environmental office and the AA hotel review board might prompt some action!

Now we are back home and settled for several days before more travel's take us down south I thought this would be a good day to bring you, dear reader, up to date with our news. As you may know we recently travelled to Italy, Bellagio on Lake Como to be precise, to photograph the wedding of Laura and Phil in the stunning and romantic surroundings of the Villa Balbianello. We decided that just to fly over, do the wedding and fly back was to miss an opportunity of visiting some of the villa’s on and around this delightful lake so we elected to go over on the Tuesday giving us 3 days of sightseeing, the wedding on the Saturday and flying home on the Monday. Our flight home was originally on the Sunday but Lufthansa decided at the last moment to cancel and only offered a 3 stop return journey to Edinburgh taking 10 hours+ so we rescheduled for a Monday flight via Frankfurt giving us an extra day in Bellagio for more sightseeing.
If you are a regular reader of this blog then you know that occasionally we review some of the hotels that we visit and so to our hotel in Italy, the Hotel Du Lac. Now, our clients had originally booked us into its sister hotel, the Hotel Bellagio, but as access was via a flight of stairs and the fact that there was no lake view I took it upon myself to rebook ourselves into the Hotel Du Lac which is situated in the centre of the town with views directly over the lake. In fact apart from the road you could not get much closer to the lake unless you wanted a swim! On arrival, several hours late due to delays, we were collected at Milan airport by a car that drove us up to Bellagio, a drive that was spectacular as we climbed up through the mountains before descending down to the town and I must say that despite the narrow roads, which reminded me very much of some of Scotland’s single track roads over on the west coast, our drive was as smooth as silk. On arrival at the hotel we were made most welcome by front of house manager Graziano who spoke impeccable English and realising that we had not yet eaten arranged a table for us outside under the portico for dinner. The hotel was eclectic, reminding me of how it would have been back in the halcyon days of the region during the 1930’s. I had reserved a room on the top floor, in fact it was described as a mini suite but I am not sure if 2 small armchairs and a TV on top of a mini bar count as a suite, but we did have 2 balcony’s and a quite stunning view over the town and onwards down the length of the lake which itself was stunning and more than well worth the additional cost. The room was very clean, tidy and comfortable with even a maid turn down service, which was quite unexpected. The hotel restaurant was situated on the first floor and with views directly over the lake and with several tables outside on the balcony so you could have breakfast Al fresco and be amused and entertained by the local sparrows looking for their breakfast. Breakfast was excellent, continental with the addition of scrambled eggs, bacon and boiled eggs, but plenty of everything and excellent coffee which makes such a difference to how the day begins. We ate, as I mentioned in the restaurant on the first evening and on subsequent evenings dined out in the town, though it was interesting to observe that there is thankfully, only Italian food available, no Indian no Chinese no McDonalds or KFC. So if you did not like Italian then perhaps this is not the place for you! However the food was excellent and on our final evening after a long day walking around the Villa Melzi we opted to dine in the hotel and I must say that Faye proclaimed it was the best spaghetti pasta she had ever tasted. To sit out in such visually luxurious surroundings underneath the archways outside this delightful hotel watching the visitors promenading by was one of the memorable highlights of our visit. We both love people watching and I still cannot come to terms as to how the Italians carry of that unique style which identifies them above all others. Is it their clothes, or is it how they wear them, their style or carriage or perhaps it’s the weather with no need for woolly jumpers, anoraks or tracksuits! I don’t know but it was a pleasure to view and reflect back to our towns and cities back in Scotland and, in most cases, the complete lack of style of the British in general.

Bellagio is a resort I would highly recommend for a visit, no car is really needed, as there are regular ferry’s to take you all over the lake and down to Como. Apart from that parking is a nightmare and very expensive. I would also highly recommend the Hotel Du Lac for its eclectic style and outstanding friendly staff but would strongly suggest that you go that extra mile and book a top floor room with lake view after all if you are going to one of the most romantic places in the world then the view over Lake Como is a must.

This weekend we have again been on a ferry, this time over the Firth of Clyde to Arran for the wedding of Neil and Rhona held at Brodick Castle. More on that tomorrow and much more on the worst 4* hotel we have ever stayed in. Be warned it won’t be pretty!

Aother image form this new body of work.

This is just to remind you all that in future all matters relating to our seminars, workshops, speaking engagements, exhibitions, business and all matters relevant to fellow photographers can now be found on our new blogsite @ http://www.yerburystudio.com

This site is now home to our personal and project development work and will be updated frequently. As always your comments are most welcome.