Palais Bénédictine - Distillerie - Bar à cocktails — Attraction in Le Havre

For tourists: Pros: a beautifull building. Many of the written texts on the displays are also in English. Cons: Do NOT go here if you do not have prior knowledge of distillation processes or how liquors are made in general. Because even if you have especially booked an English tour you probably get pointed to an audio app. An app that is probably made with an artificial voice or even with AI translation because some words, like Angel share, are broken of in an odd manner. I am also still looking for the natural lightning bolts that are incorporated in the cellar. The explanations in the app are pretty basic (when the audio guide is finished the tour guide is still talking in French for 15 minutes) Next to that the audio app begins with a story about the drink you are supposed to have gotten?!. And a lot of entries in the audio tour are about the architecture, design of the furniture, and history of the building. Only a few are about the distillation process and even those give nothing to no information on the making of Dom Benedictine. But if you hope to ask the tourguide for clarification (remember you booked the English tour?) you can forget that because the person doing the tour only speaks une leadle beat English. A tour guide that gives a tour with an enthousiasm i only have seen with people who have been dead for centuries but are still bound by the mortal realm and have to stay there untill someone releases them of their curse. The tour also starts 45 minutes after the moment you booked it for. You are let in at the time you booked the tour for to venture to a few rooms in the building (where you can see a selection of old doorknobs, musical onstruments and religious statues) only to figure out for yourself that you have to gather in a room downstairs where a an informative movie is playing but the Windows explorer windows is blocking the view of VLC Player so you can only hear the French audio. When the guide arrives the guide begins her talk while the video presentation is still playing so that you, even if you speak une petit peu French yourself, have to really concentrate on what the guide is telling you. To top it all off when you, after a short tour through the cellar, enter the tasting room the audio guide explains in detail about the decoration of the room but says nothing about what you are tasting. In short, a nice building to see but you are not leaving with any knowledge of the product unless you are capable of speaking French.

For the company: Redo your app. Hire an native speaking voice actor that tells the same story as the tour guide. I want to know about the aging process not about the walnut bar in a room where DJ's can perform and the green wall that reflects the ingredients in the product. Teach your employees English! An international renowned product like Dom Benedictine can expect to attract international tourists. Do you want them to leave as ambassador of your product or with the knowledge that the granite top of the bar reflects the coastal influence? clean your tasting room! It is a beautiful room but the fact that the tasting glasses where sticky on the outside and stuck to the white alabaster counter (yet another fact i learned through the app instead of learning about what i was tasting). Hire (or teach the) guides to inspire those who are coming to visit. Let them be the advertisement for the product and let them make visitors leave with an urge to tell others about their wonderful experience. Now we came as fan of the product and left disenchanted. I guess it is true what they say, never to meet...

A pretty disappointing visit of this truly monumental building. The art collections on display are way less important than some travel guidebooks might make you believe. And should you happen to have seen pictures of impressive rooms: You see just three of them (plus a staircase), one basically empty, one stuffed with lots of text-only displays and vitrines showing unrelated items.

Attention: No cash accepted for tickets, cards only. You have to buy your ticket yourself at some machine, which slows down the ticketing process significantly. My machine didn't print the ticket I had paid for, and it took more than 20 minutes until someone finally solved the problem, which went completely off my already paid visit time (time slots are limited).

Nevertheless I even overtook some other, slower visitors, just to see that the guide had started the introductory explanations for the guided tour of the destillery five to ten minutes early, so it was impossible to catch up again. That rendered the whole guided tour useless. The little one gets to see of the destillery installations from the distance through a glass pane is indeed impressive, but sadly, you won't get any closer to look at interesting details.

The tasting at the end was okay, but the three little sips you get make me ponder whether the money wouldn'd have been spent better for trying the same drinks at a bar, where you'd probably get a glass of each of them for less than the expensive price of this tour. Altogether, this visit felt mostly like a waste of...

I visited this palace together with someone who doesn’t speak neither understand french, and we were the only 2 people who said to the guide, Samantha, that we don’t speak French. I can understand french (as I speak a bit and my mother tongue is Spanish), I noticed that Samantha was giving quite more information in French than in English, what I consider as not professional guide in a touristic attraction like this. I asked her about an explanation that she made in French about where the spices come from and she said to me that I could read that information in the description of every spice. Well I was wondering why she is a guide, if I can read any information. I thought that a guide is there to explain more than what is written and to answer questions from visitors. Samantha made us feel really uncomfortable treating us like this and taking us beside the rest of visitors. I have been many times in France and I have felt myself like at home, when people speak to me about the stereotype that French people are arrogant, I was always denying such stereotype, but I guess people mean the attitude that Samantha showed me there. It is a pity. Beside that, the castle is a beautiful place and has an interesting history. As for the liquor, I guess it is a personal taste, for me it...