Le Grand Hôtel de Cabourg - MGallery Normandie — Hotel in Lisieux

We stayed her for 3 nights. I can’t believe the average 4star+ rating on Tripadvisor. ||Don’t be fooled. |This once must have been a chique Grand Hotel. ||I realize every critique has to be seen in the right context. But when you charge 600+ a night, you set a certain expectation. And, at the Grand Hotel in Cabourg they fail to meet that.||In all fairness. The staff is great. Friendly and helpful. ||At check out, when I was asked about our experience, I did express some of my disappointment. So was, I overheard, the person standing next to me….. ||When I left the lobby I was approached by a guest representative who wanted to know more about my complaints. I spent a few minutes explaining but other than an apology I got 5000 Accor courtesy points.||That is roughly the equivalent of 10 euros. Sorry, this is making things worse! I had a similar experience when checking in. As I seem to have reached Gold status at Accorr, I got a voucher for 2 drinks at the bar. Nice touch. But when I tried to use them I was told that the “signature” cocktail, a Negroni worth a lousy 12 ir 14 euro’s or so, couldn’t be ordered with the voucher. I could get a glass of campari instead (priced a bit less, was it 10 euro? So only a few euros less)…..||This is typical. It’s typical for Accor. They try to play loyalty marketing, but they miserably fail in executing it. Then again, we’re in France. Quality (of service) here follows different rules. Coffee capsules don’t get replenished. The bags for the linnen service don’t get returned after the first use, etc||To me the whole idea about loyalty marketing is to reward clients. To make them feel good. But if you don’t understand how it works and you create more frustration than tender love and care, then in my humble opinion, you better should stay away from it all.||Back to the hotel experience…||Old. We can appreciate authenticity. But this hotel is just old. Does not have the grand 5star feel. Badly maintained. One example: The white curtains in the bar. More black (dirty) than they are white. ||Old. The room. While big. It just felt really old. Outdated. Dirty carpet. Overall very low quality standards.||Bathroom, black tiles, creme tiles in the shower with super white silicone sealing. Feels like it was done by a do it yourself amateur.||Airco, not sure there was one ….anyway, it was way too hot, so we opened the front window. Sea side. The whole night until 6am we had kids doing a “nuit blanche” in front of the hotel, right under our room. Noisy, with a portable speaker set. Constantly shouting, chanting and singing. Nobody who did anything about it.||Restaurant. Also too hot again. When I got the bill presented my 135 euro bottle of wine was charged at 185. “Sorry, computer problem”. ||I can go on. |I must sound like a spoiled brat, whining about first world problems. But… ||It’s what I told the guest representative. When you pay close to 2000 euro for 3 nights, you just expect something else. And I feel entitled to complain when I did not experience one but a whole slew of failures .||Every price sets a certain expectation. Telling me that your pricing is aligned with other hotels of “this standard” in the area is the wrong...

Having stayed along the coast in Deauville last year we decided to try a couple of French resorts this year and after 4 nights in the lovely MGallery in Dinard we moved on to The Grand Hotel de Cabourg. ||||The hotel lives up to its name with magnificent rooms with ours facing the sea. The rooms are spacious and have a bathroom/dressing room worthy of this sort of hotel. ||||The welcome on arrival was as you would expect and we were particularly well looked after by Christelle on reception and her colleagues. Having only travelled from Dinard we arrived a little early but whilst waiting for our room to be ready we enjoyed a great club sandwich with fries and a beer in the lounge bar.||||Breakfast was well organised with a huge choice of delights to temp the palate and with fried eggs available on request to go with the great flavoured bacon and tasty sausages. Breads were fantastic as were the viennoiserie and the little pats of local delicious butter. ||||Unusually the restaurant at this 5 star hotel is not open all week but reception managed to get us in for our last night and the cuisine in Le Balbec lived up to it's gastronomic promise with a fantastic Sea Bass cooked in a salt crust pastry. It is a pity that this restaurant is not open all week perhaps with a slightly more down market menu since nearby restaurants on the sea front are no where near the standard of Dinard. On the other hand very good food is available in the bar or on room service.||||Last year just before Christmas we stayed in the 5 star Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston USA and this hotel had a restaurant so busy that Hotel Guests needed to book due to the popularity of the restaurant with locals, and this popularity was down to two things: great food on the menu and competitive pricing.||||This hotel has the ability to outshine the likes of Hotels Barriere in Deauville but at the moment is quite highly priced especially...

As usual I should have trusted the reviews where previous guests commented on the entirely inadequate level of service delivered at this hotel. Too bad I didn't. On March 6 I sent the hotel an e-mail asking whether it would be possible to put two beds in a room with sea view and terrace. The hotel answered on the same day: "we can foresee to install two single beds in a room with sea view and terrace". I waited until March 14, as I was checking the weather forecast daily to ensure we would not get a rainy week in Normandy. Reservation was then made online and right afterwards, to be on the safe side, I sent another e-mail to the hotel: "Hey, the reservation is in place, please think about my single beds". One day later I receive a generic e-mail from the hotel talking about check-in times and pet policy and (SURPRISE!), saying that there are no rooms with sea view / terrace and two single beds. i called the hotel because I believed (hoped) this was a standard e-mail that did not take into consideration the personalised e-mail exchange I had had with the hotel prior to making the reservation. How naive I was! No, they had lied to me, they cannot "instal two single beds in a room with seaview / terrace" for EUR 600 a night. The person at the phone tried to assure me that the bed in the room was large enough for me an my 24-year old son. This is really funny. Should the dog also sleep with us in the big bed? Thank you, but for a total price of EUR 3,000 for a five-day stay we can for sure get two beds elsewhere. Reservation...