Yachthafenresidenz Hohe Düne

We had our family Christmas here. Besides the nice design of the hotel and the clean rooms, there is nothing good about this place. The service here was unfriendly, slow, and disorganized from the start of our booking through check out. The staff seems to be mainly comprised of grumpy trainees. They also don’t seem to speak German or English very well, which understandably makes it difficult to provide good service. The painful experience started with the booking process. Our group wanted a block of 6 suites. The reservations team took 7-9 days to respond between each email, sometimes only after me following up. In the week leading up to our stay, the team was a bit more responsive, but in general they made it needlessly difficult to organize our stay with them. When we arrived, we didn’t even get a “hello” from the reception. The keys were shoved in our face and no info or help was offered (no info about breakfast, where the facilities were, no offer of help with our luggage). Except for the breakfast, the food is overpriced, the selection is not great, and taste-wise, the food was pretty bland and unmemorable. One night in da Mario, we waited 20 mins to get our leftovers packed, and we ended up just leaving as it seemed the staff had totally forgotten about us. Another night in the Brasserie, the staff seemed very annoyed to serve us - to be fair it was busy that night, but our group felt unwelcome and uncomfortable there. They’ve overpriced a lot of their food and drink; make sure to bring your own water bottles or you’ll be stuck paying 7,90€ for 0,5L water. One night we asked for two liters of water delivered to the room; the bill including service charge and tip was nearly 40€ 😄 The last little treat from their staff came today: due to illness, we needed to late cancel two of our spa reservations. When we canceled, the spa generously offered to let us cancel free of charge. However, after we left, their team emailed us to let us know nevermind, we would have to pay after all.

All in all nice resort with an interesting location on the Ostsee coast. Nice architecture and comfortable rooms, offers spa program, boat renting, has a nice restaurant and bar. It would get better rating if not prone to incidents with customers. You may end up being truly frowned upon if you arrive to breakfast lately or if you enjoy it too much and stay too long and approach the time when the breakfast ends. Usually an older blonde, thin lady wearing a medical protection mask shows up frowning and warning you about your 'misdemanor'. Also, an senior male receptionist (called Uwe, I think) insisted on paying accomodation fee although it was already paid (prepaid by a tourist agency which did the booking for the room). Upon he was politely asked to check with the manager, he simply said "No." I was shocked by such a reaction, as it was impossible to reach hotel manager in such a high-end (or supposed to be a high-end) resort! Only after his more approachable colleague, Ms. Carrillo Gomez interventioned, a senior staff member was somehow found and the matter luckily resolved in the last minute for me to catch the train for returning home... So a word of advice: 1) Do not pre-pay for the room, you may be scammed into trying to pay twice 2) If you do, print out the invoice and remind the staff tah you paid for the room every day 3) Avoid dealing with Mr Uwe 4) Wash out the bitternes of possible hostile interactions at the hotel bar