Hôtel de Glace — Hotel in Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier

Stayed at the water park for a day with a cabana and spent a night in the ice hotel in a suite with a private sauna and hot tub. Very expensive but once in a lifetime experience.

Overall: Facilities are top notch and experiences are excellent. Got great photos. Customer service is terrible.

Customer service was non-existant, run by a mixture of teenagers with no comprehension of either English nor French. For a place in the same town as 33% of the combat capable Army i was shocked to find a group running this place not capable of simple direction or thought. The difficulty entailed in trying to get the cabana we ordered online…. I might as well been trying to use a frequent flyer lounge in a Soviet era airport. No one understood what it entailed and how to give you access. We went through two levels of ´security´ each stage asking for process for access for our cabana for which they responded ´on the otherside´. Arriving and realizing that this was all not true before asking someone next to the cabana on how to get access to the cabana we booked. Then after they talk to their supervisor by radio for them to tell us we needed to go back and talk to the first gentlemen we talked to. In classic Soviet fashion we went out and stood near the front desk clearly having done the whole process to get to the pool to come back out yet again. For that gentlemen to only tell us to once again get into the back of the line and wait in our wet boardshorts and towel. He also was surprised that the cabana had locker access keys once we asked what the keys were for on the key chain even though we had already confirmed and paid for separate lockers during the previous movement through ‘security’. Imagine a 160 odd dollar cabana didn’t come with a locker…… Once we got through that the water park was excellent and we had a lot of fun. A couple of similar hiccups with credit card machines not working and staff not knowing what to do for a half hour but overall we had a couple great hours of enjoyment at the park.

The ice hotel was a similar experience with regard to customer service or rather a lack of it. The website fails to fully explain what you are paying for as the same teenagers that have run this establishment must have created the website. Actually, belay that I wrote more complete websites in the notepad application in high school with a more detailed idea of how your day will play out, apologies to teenagers everywhere. I felt like I was playing a game of cluedo figuring out through process of elimination and testing what were the timings for the evening. Note the check in for your room in the non-ice hotel is 4pm (an unheard of time for a third world country let alone Quebec), website doesn’t clearly tell you that you can’t check into the ice hotel at 4pm. Instead you get to walk around the hotel like anyone else until 9pm, but in good service fashion we were told we could use the hot tub at 8pm (false). Which meant waiting around for another hour. We spent two hours talking to the service people, looking at our welcome package and surveying their website to try and plan out our night and it didn’t survive first or second contact with the staff of the hotel. The actual hotel experience was excellent just a little marred by the whole experience previous and the fact we spent 1200 dollars for 12 hours (check out of the ice hotel is at 9 with three mandatory wake up calls at 0800, 0815, 0830. Outlined in this review is more information about timings than on their website. We managed to have a couple hours of fun in the hot tub and sauna before bed but not...

Yes the 'Ice Hotel' is a much greater feature of a larger family resort... who actually cares? We didn't, we knew what to expect, a night out in the blistering cold of an 'ice hotel'. We booked two nights at the Valcartier resort, first night in the ice hotel and the second in the proper resort hotel itself. ||As part of the booking for the night in the ice hotel, you are also assigned a proper hotel room, so if you can't hack the cold you have a fall back position (for all you softies out there). Joking aside, the assigned hotel room acts as your 'base' to drop off all your luggage and all other valuables you have with. Ideal as wouldn't want to have all my luggage sat in an ice box getting damp. ||Once checked into the resort hotel, you can go down to the ice hotel for a wander about and look at all the rooms. The ice sculptures are amazing and done by different artists. You can see their name plaques dotted around and outside each room. It was very quiet for us at the time and the bar was open to get a refreshing ice glass drink. The cocktails are strong so recommend bringing a bottle/can of sprite etc to water it down a bit. Nevertheless, we managed to walk around unheeded. ||The overnight stay itself, you can't access your room until 21:00. The hosts themselves supply the sleeping bags which are North Face ones and good for -30C, so don't worry about being cold. You get briefed on how to prepare yourselves for the stay. Firstly, go into one of the outdoor hot tubs. Get proper warmed up! We chose a room that had it's own private hot tub. If you are willing to spend more, I'd recommend this! The tub to yourselves sat in 39C (105F) heat! Bliss, especially with an open night sky. ||Once this was done, you go back to your 'base', get a shower and proper dry off. You rbody is 'prepared' for the cold. From there, it's a case of wearing base layers, put on a jacket, warm hat and boots and off you go to your allocated ice hotel room. In the room itself, take your boots off and tuck them into each other to stop overnight moisture. Put your jacket into the bottom of the sleeping bag then hop in! Warm hat on and snuggle up for the night. If you have a fire, you need to go to the resort hotel reception to let them know the time you'd like the fire lit. We chose 23:00 so we could drift off with the fire on. It only lasts half an hour and is purely for ambient effect. It does not warm up the room for obvious reasons. ||Don't worry about sleeping in, they'll wake you around 08:15. I was already awake by 07:00 bursting for a pee in a cool room that was -13C 🥶But I was snug. I've spent many a night out in the cold during my Army days but for this, you don't need that sort of background. Follow the guidance given by the helpful staff and you will be cosy all night! 😁👍||Again, thanks to the staff here for making us feel welcome! If you are thinking about staying here, don't think! Just go and do it! ||A review on the resort hotel will be...

TLDR: Just buy tickets for a tour and do not stay overnight, it's not worth the price.

This was honestly the worst stay on our trip. We left this as our last stop of the week and were so very excited for it. The Ice hotel itself was beautiful and the artistry behind it was amazing but that was the only good thing about the stay. We paid over $800 for our room overnight and we wish we would have just paid to take a tour of the Ice Hotel instead of paying to sleep in one of the ice rooms. The Valcartier hotel is where you spend most of your time since you are not allowed to check in to your ice hotel room until 9pm (then they wake you up at 8am so they can show the room off in tours), but they were either very understaffed or need more attentive workers on weekdays. Over half of their stores and restaurants were closed even though their hours said they should be open, the only cafe that was open in the morning was manned by the girls at the reception desk so we had to wait 10 minutes just for them to come over and get us a muffin, even though we were there before the other guests who wanted to check out. Right after we checked in there was a retinue of housekeepers that were taking up the hall to clean the rooms on our floor for over 5 hours making it difficult to come and go, and after all of that there was still little pieces of garbage all over the floors (bits of wrapper, popcorn, etc), the receptionist also asked if we wanted 2 extra housecoats since there were 4 of us, which we never got. The lady checking tickets to view the ice hotel was very rude when we were trying to figure out where we were going and what we needed to get in, even though we had tickets and there was only 5 people in line at the most (we were off to the side to let them pass). We later called reception to get closing hours of the ice bar so we didn't miss our chance to get a drink (included in the price of our stay), only to find that the bar tender left at least 30 minutes early and it was closed, we had to go to management the next day to get our money back even though we really would have rather experienced having a drink in an ice glass. I had a wonderful massage at the aroma spa but when we went to do the thermal experience the actual aroma sauna was out of order. This hotel is pretty out of the way and you will need to either drive out or rent a car, as there are no transit options, we ubered out and had no way to get back until we found a taxi that was willing to drive out and pick us up. Because it is so out of the way, all you can rely on for amenities is in the hotel, so having most things closed down was very limiting. So overall we were very disappointed with our stay in what was supposed to be a luxury hotel and was a splurge for us. Our time would have been better...