Deverevenues Reviews 5

We have booked catered training rooms at De Vere Venues for years and greatly enjoyed their rooms and food, but they have seriously let us down. We made a booking a while ago for October 2020, and they are demanding we pay for it even though the service they can provide during the lockdown is completely different to the normal service, and not suitable for our clients. In short, they are failing to provide the service we contracted for while claiming we still have to pay for it. Their justification is that they are within government guidelines, which may be the case - but this does not address the problem that the service is completely different from what we are used to and require. They have been extremely poor in providing information about this and behaved in a shabby fashion. Avoid signing a contract with them! Sadly even being a client of many years does not prevent you from being abused and mis-treated

Grand Connaught Rooms Holborn London:

A great day ruined
We booked our wedding here and in the early stages whilst working with Francesca all seemed to be going very smoothly and to plan.

We agreed on seating plans for the ceremony and for the staff there to arrange the seats accordingly and our caterers and DJ would set up the main room for dinner and the entertainment.

We had a call from one of our ushers at 3.30 pm to advise that the room had not been made ready and that there were no chairs in there to be set up, we called the venue and asked why this was the case? we were informed that there we no staff to help and that they did not set up rooms for events!!

We had agreed that this room was to be set up by the venue teams.

The chairs were finally tracked down and arranged by our guys.
Not a good start.

The ceremony went very well and the after party was also successful but this was only because our Caterer, DJ, Ushers and best men work their socks off to ensure all was good for us, there was NO assistance from the venue team at all.

We were expecting to have a floor supervisor for the entire evening and a cloakroom assistant all evening as per the contacted agreement, we saw neither for the entire evening.

Our caterers also had to inform us of chronic vermin issue, Mice everywhere in the kitchens so they had to do a deep clean before any food was prepared, this was also echoed back to us after the event from 3 of our guests that saw mice in the Drawing room bar area!

We had also reported the mice issue on a one of our earlier visits when we were sat in the little bar downstairs and there was little Micky running about, we reported this but clearly nothing has been done to address this problem.
One of our guests was also accused of assaulting on of the staff, of course I needed to address this immediately so made contact with the manager, he made inquiries and the staff member changed his story to Insulted, funny that 4 of us heard him say assaulted?
One of our guests made a joke of asking the staff what they were watching on TV every time they popped outside during the course of the evening, they were clearly to busy to do what they should have been doing.
The staff here are less than friendly should you need to ask them for anything and not wanting to sound horrible but some of them did not understand what was required of them and have no idea of what contractual agreements stand for in the UK.

The rodent issues has been reported to the local authorities who will be investigating

I have made contact with the manager and the directors but to date all they want to do is arrange a face to face meeting to discuss these problems, Time wasting springs to mind.

I have been told that I will have an answer by close of play in 24 hours time, I will not be holding my breath.

Totally and utterly disappointing experience and even worse customer service with excuses on top of excuses to try and cover up their mistakes.

We have finally come to an agreement regarding compensation, Not what it should be mind you.

They even managed to mess up the repayment of the money.... you couldn't make it up.

I have stayed in the devenport in Greenwich while I have been away on business and have to say it is terrible.
I've had my window left wide open with my valuables left on the side and when I asked management to have a work with housekeeping and leave it closed they said they would to my supprise the window was open again when I got back to my hotel room from work.
And then for housekeeping to come into my room and eat food that I have left in my room wrapped up to come back to find it has been unwrapped and half of the food missing, so I went to complain to reception for them to tell me they would send a manager to my room, I waited an hour and a half before I went back to reception just for the lad behind the desk to say they're in a meeting it's just one of those things you will have to wait.
On top of that the food here is terrible I've had to send back several dishes as the chefs cannot cook the simplest of foods.
The service here has been aweful and some of the staff members have been very rude and have poor customer service skills.
I would not recommend this hotel to anyone stay away they claim this is a 4star hotel I wouldn't even give it a 3star.

I've stayed at Harben House, Staverton Park, Sunningdale Park and Chichley Hall and I've always been really impressed with how well decorated the rooms are and how low the prices are. Weekends I've been charged £19 before booking on the day for a really decent almost 4 star room. But the facilities are a bit limited at their hotels and they seem to like describing themselves as "venues" not hotels, so sometimes you wont be able to get food or room service during off peak periods. Harben house was being slowly refurbished when I stayed so sometimes you got lucky and had a new room and other times you get a bad room. In one of the bad rooms I got an electric shock off an iron which tripped the electrics but the manager couldn't be more apologetic and offered me a free stay and moved me to a nicer room. Harbens rooms are bit small though but serve the purpose. Staverton Park and Chichley Hall are amazing and feel more like 4 star places. Sunningdale Park was really beautiful and had great modern rooms with a lot of space. It seems to be on the site of a Political University and is split up into several buildings. I inadvertently walked into the student union bar and tried to charge the tab to my room.

I recently stayed in the De Vere Hotel at Wokefield Park in Berkshire and it is probably the worst hotel experience I have ever had.

I have only given this review 1 star as it wasn't possible to rate it zero!

Our rooms were very basic and reminded me of what it might have been like staying in the hotel in the 1950s.

I ate in the restaurant but regrettably it was only a hot buffet. Service was restricted to us having to ask for drinks, rather than being offered a wine menu and the food was something one might expect to see at a motorway service station. It appeared to have been left for hours on a hot plate and as a consequence had dried and had an unpalatable appearance.

At breakfast, our arrival was greeted by someone who was complaining that it was too early for them - it was only 7.15am.

Once again, the food was a hot buffet and had the appearance of being discarded by the chef to the mercy of the hot lights that shone upon it until every ounce of moisture had been surrendered. The bacon looked, and tasted like cardboard, the sausages were clearly the cheapest the chef could afford and fried eggs are apparently quite a scarce item in Berkshire as despite waiting for 15 minutes, none appeared.

Upon arrival the previous evening, I had requested the receptionist to book a taxi for the following morning at 8.00am. The taxi never arrived and as such, I was late for my first meeting of the day.

Quite simply an awful experience.