Surf Hotel & Residences — Hotel in Buena Vista

While the Surf Hotel offers a setting and venue unlike any other in the state of Colorado, they make you feel like they are the ones footing the $65k+ bill. I'd like to make it clear this in no way reflects the great job our event coordinator, Melissa, did. She was fantastic - but there are arbitrary rules that she has to follow, that become red tape for us as GUESTS AND CLIENTS of the hotel. As some background, all of our guests were not local and they stayed at the Surf for 2-4 nights, in addition to spending money at their restaurant.||Here are a few of the issues we had:||-Our package came with choice of 2 craft cocktails to add to their sign above the bar. Everything else was open bar. I wanted to add a "Tanqueray and tonic" to honor my dad. Melissa informed us that because it was a 3rd drink, even though part of our open bar, that they couldn't add it to the sign above the bar or they would charge us like $10 pp additional. ||-No bridal suite, or or place for either of us to get ready without seeing each other. As a solution, they offered to sell us another room for the night for $200. This made us feel nickle and dimed given how much we were spending in addition to all of our guests. I mean really, out of $65k, you need an extra $200? (More on pricing strategies for a business below)||-Disco ball rental costs an additional $500. Now we are in PRICING STRATEGIES. Add $700 to our total package cost, and we wouldn't have gotten pissed at the $200 bridal suite room and $500 disco ball rental. ||-Help installing ceiling installations for the florist was $100/hr. ||-Would not accommodate any sense of overflow when we were anticipating an extra 10 people, even though they have a private dining room in the restaurant. Instead, the solution was to rent out the entire building. ||-Would not store our cake for 1 night (baker was leaving town and needed to drop the cake off on the Friday before)||-Told us they require us getting enough cake for every single guest because they did not want our guests getting angry at their staff (Not really our problem/my guests know how to act right??)||-THIS ONE IS THE WORST OF THEM ALL: we had 10 people for our rehearsal dinner, which we wanted to keep casual at their restaurant. Our wedding was in the shoulder season (Nov.). When I asked if they could prepare a table for 10 in their dining room at 5pm, they said they don't take reservations but we could go check in with host once it opens at 5pm. At this point, my husband (who never gets angry), threw down his hands in frustration and the lack of hospitality. Coming from this industry and the restaurant industry, we were shocked. ||-Whoever designed the rooms have no business designing hotel rooms. In many of the rooms there is no where for guests to hang dresses or suits, or put clothes in general. Bathroom counters have no counter to place make up/toiletries. Cleaning services do not pick up anything or move items around to wipe surfaces down. In the Chateau, there is NO ICE MACHINE (??? wtf??) so you have to travel over to the main building and go up some flights to get ice. ||Overall, we regretted going with the Surf because of how stressful it was to plan and how icky it felt being a transaction. Our next wedding (Ha) will take place at the Sonnenalp - where we are treated like guests...

While the building is beautiful and location on the river is great, the hotel itself is not as well thought out in design and function. We had our wedding here which is another review unto itself. 95% of our guests stayed here and I stayed in one of the chateau rooms.

There is nowhere to hang any clothes in many of the rooms. While we had a small armoire, it wasn’t big enough to fit our dresses, jackets and suits needed for our wedding. My parents room had literally nothing. I asked one of the women working there if she suggested we just lay our clothes on the floor and she told us management has been given feedback on this problem and hasn’t done anything to change it.

The rooms itself are barren and the walls are dirty. The bathrooms are so large yet you have no where to place your toiletries. It feels like the team who designed this place had no experience in hotels. No ice machine in the entire building - would have to go into the other hotel building and to the 2nd or 3rd floor. We had a weird, large metal desk in our room - why not a dresser? The room was very dark with small windows as well.

The daily cleaning service was basically making the bed. There was no tidying up of the bathroom and our toiletries. No cleaning the sink.

One of the more disturbing parts of our stay was when my friend checked out, drove to Denver and realized she left her jewelry box in the room that contained her engagement ring and wedding ring, amongst other jewelry totaling $20,000 in value. She called the hotel and they told her they didn’t find anything. I ended up going down to the front desk and talking to Christopher. He was overly confident that his cleaning team didn’t find anything and flippantly told us that they logged the jewelry box in their Lost and found and that was all he could do. I asked if there was a manager who interviewed the cleaning team, did they double check. I reminded him that this is not just a small item but something with a high monetary value. He didn’t offer any other help in locating it. We pushed him and finally asked if we could go look through the room. He acquiesced and within seconds, we found a the box underneath the bed. Obviously no one checked the room for the jewelry box to begin with.

Planning our wedding here was very difficult and we were met with sooooo much red tape. We loved working with Melissa, but with all the “rules” it made us feel like the surf was footing the bill and not us. There was no sense of hospitality in this process; we were an indispensable customer and not a client or guest. One example of this: even though 95% of our guests were staying at the hotel and we were spending over $50,000 on the wedding, they wouldn’t prepare a table for 12 people for our rehearsal dinner at 5pm because “the restaurant doesn’t accept reservations”.

The service during our wedding was fantastic and Melissa led a great execution. But the frustrations during the planning process caused us to have a bad taste in our mouths leading up to the day. We wished we had done our wedding at the...

We booked a chateau for our anniversary. The setting is gorgeous; we overlooked the river. The hotel itself is beautiful. We arrived around 130 and were not exactly greeted at all, but asked what we needed by someone who wouldn't make eye contact with us. She told us our room wasn't ready (we didn't know what time check-in was, apparently it's 3). So we went to the brewery across the street (fyi, they were no more friendly). We were able to get into our room and it was cute with a balcony , coffee, tea, and a mini fridge. There were dead moths all over the floor and the walls were dirty, so it clearly hasn't been cleaned well, but the bed itself was very comfortable. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant after a 45 min wait. Bar staff "didn't know" if they had organic wine and that was the end of that. Our food was pretty good though. Our first night was super hot and this was on a very cool August night. We turned the thermostat to cool and turned the temp down to 60 and it never kicked on. So we opened the windows reluctantly as there are no screens and presumably why there were dead moths all over the floor. Unfortunately, we didn't get much of a breeze and slept very hot. We asked the same person at the front desk about it and were informed there is a remote to control the a/c rather than the thermostat. Would have been nice to know that at check-in. Also, no hair dryer in the room which they had for us in the lobby, but there is no room service, so if you need anything, you need to mask up and walk down to the check-in counter to get it from front desk staff who seem very annoyed by your presence. They had great coffee in the room but, no one ever came to clean our room, so we had to go to the front desk to get more coffee and half and half twice. We saw and heard housekeeping going to all the other rooms nearby but no one came to ours so we had to wash out our coffee mugs each time. There was also a big wedding at the hotel and therefore no place for us to park in front of our chateau when we returned from our day out. Literally not a single parking spot closer than the big lots behind the brewery which are a few blocks away. There was also very loud music playing all night as a result which really interrupted our serene, peaceful, relaxing expectations on night two. We went to the hotel restaurant just for dessert and there was an hour and a half long wait at 830pm so we asked about food room service. Again, no room service, but rather, take out which you can go get yourself. The text system to order and notify when our order was ready was nice but the dessert (cheesecake) was unfortunately not very tasty. These are small things but not what you expect from a hotel in this price range. Very disappointing. I'm not sure I would come back here. The potential is there but needs significant work. Mostly on friendliness, communication, and...