Hotel Garni Laaxerhof — Hotel in Untertauern

Beware, the owner of this hotel is an underhand & dishonest man. We booked a weeks stay around 8 months prior to our stay this March 2024. I accidentally got the dates of our holiday wrong by 6 days. I immediately emailed the owner, Marcus Buissman, and asked him to please move our dates back by just 6 days in order to then book our corresponding flights. He agreed at first, however after weeks of us pestering him he still hadn’t changed our dates and then became elusive and refused to take my calls. We received an email saying that the hotel was too busy over summer 2023 and that if we wanted to change our dates, bear in mind this was months & months in advance of our stay, he suggested I cancel our ‘non - refundable’ booking and rebook for the correct dates myself. I assumed his suggestion was an honest one and that this would be fine so I followed his suggestion as was keen to amend the dates…. Obviously this was simply an amendment NOT a cancellation. What then transpired was that he/hotel Laaxerhof took our payment twice. When I questioned this, he told me I had cancelled a ‘Non-refundable’ booking and refused to refund me. Consequently we had to pay for the hotel room twice, once for the wrong dates (6-11 April 2024) then also for the correct dates (29 Mar - 4 Apr 2024). Incidentally, what is advertised as a 2 roomed studio is absolutely tiny, no room to swing a mouse let alone a cat! We acted in good faith and feel appalled that he sadly, acted in very bad faith. The dishonest way Marcus Buissman has treated us as a family is absolutely atrocious and I warn any new potential guests to be incredibly careful when making your booking through booking.com. Please note this was not the fault of booking.com, it was the hotel that took my funds twice although I fail to see why they still represent this hotel as they told me how bad they felt at the situation but were at a loss to assist us as the hotel was responsible. Luckily we still managed to have a fantastic holiday. I would like to add that the staff who work for this awful man were actually very helpful whilst we were on our stay, the hotel is basic but very clean and the breakfast is good. There is a 25 minute walk into the town if that’s where you are heading in the evening, the taxis are a standard €16. No surprise that the owner lives offsite in Vienna, too scared to face his ripped off guests...

I usually would not take time to let negative reviews unless a place really makes me lose my patience. I highly not recommend this hotel for several reasons.

-if you book on booking, once you finish your stay, if you were not happy with it, they will make it appear as "cancelled" so that you can not let a review!! It happened to us and to other customers apparently. We reported them to booking.

-on booking they announce 20€ breakfast and then they tell you 25€ per email

-the hotel has 2buildings, which is not explained properly in the description, they just precise before booking if you are a group be careful let us know because there are 2buildings. That's the only moment you get this info. What does it mean? If you do not have a car as it was our case, you have to walk 4min from one hotel to the other with your suitcases on an iced road. To have breakfast, you need to walk outside the street meaning putting your winter clothes on, and then walk up again to pick your ski stuffs. That's totally not what we were expecting for a quick breakfast before skiing.

-last but not least, even if you stay several days there is a little coffee machine in the bedroom (which does not work properly neither), and they let you 2 coffee caps even if you stay 3 or 4days. The cleaning lady does not clean the cup neither let new caps. As we did not want to walk and lose time every morning with the breakfast in the other building we thought to just take a coffee and go so we asked the receptionist to have at least one cap per day, and she says it is only 2caps for the whole stay, if you want more you need to pay. That's so ridiculous.

For my work I travel to many hotels every months so I have a lot of experience in travelling, and I really felt this place has been one of the most greedy place I have stayed. It was not particularly cheap, but they had a very "cheap" behaviour with customers trying to get even money for a coffee cup when you pay 200€ the night.

Those are all reasons why I would personally rate it as a...

6-person ski holiday from 22-29 December 2018.||Stayed in Type-C Apartment #7: 2 bedrooms and sleeper couch for kids (8yo and 6yo)...which is located at Laaxerhof Upper (adding an extra 300m walk to the lifts)||||Pros||+ Affordable.||+ Fairly close to ski hire (Sport SAM), ski school (Ski School Koch), and ski lifts.||+ Great-sized apartment (Type C) for 6 people.||+ Great communication via emails from the staff. They answered all questions we had.||+ Shuttle service from the Station was a win. The driver (we had Steven) was awesome, and even stopped just outside of Obertauern at a large grocery store so that we could do our shopping there...but, see under cons||||Cons||- The transfer shuttle small-print about it being EUR 150 in each direction. Really thought this was included, until we requested it after making the reservation. The EUR 150 is from Salzburg Airport. We arrived at Salzburg Train Station...which became a price of EUR 165 each way. This just needs to be made more obvious up front.||- Considering the mandatory EUR 115 cleaning fee, underneath the beds and sideboard on kitchen/lounge were very dirty. I don't think that these areas had seen a broom in a good 6 months.||- Really only ski-in/out if you are all experienced skiers, and don't have to walk the kids to/from ski-school each day.||- A LONG walk to the town center. Better to take the bus (free with ski pass) or taxi (flat rate of EUR 12). Closest store for decent grocery shopping is the SPAR...so lugging purchases back...