Vesting Hotel Naarden

One of my pet hates is the assumption that everyone has and is willing and able to use a smartphone to perform functions perfectly well served by reliable lower tech solutions. I thought restaurants which provide only QR codes stuck to tables instead of a proper paper or chalkboard menu were bad enough, and then I checked in at Hotel Vesting. On checking in, I was told that to get into my room, they would send me an e-mail which I would then have to open and then click on and slide on links in the e-mail and wave my phone by my bedroom door to open it. Not everyone has a smartphone and even if they do, they either might not work, or might be out of battery, or might not have (expensive) roaming enabled. My own phone was misbehaving during my trip to Holland (refusing to allow me to make calls or send SMS). The last thing you want checking in after a long day's travel, when the phone battery might be running low, is to be told that you need to rely on your phone having enough battery life for you to get back into the building or your room late at night. To his credit, after my grumbles, the young man who checked me in went away and found a key ring with a large metal key and some sort of key card (referring to a different hotel name) that I was able to use to get into my room instead of having to rely on my phone. While he claimed that people lose or forget key cards and metal keys (and yes, I once spent an afternoon in a Sicilian post office queue to post a metal key back to a guesthouse when I found it in my bag), every other Dutch hotel I stayed in provided key cards. Hotel Vesting could save money by providing slightly less posh toiletries than Aesop brand if the cost of replacing lost key cards was really an issue! I can only imagine how my 80 year old mother would have reacted if told she had to fiddle around with an e-mail on a smartphone to get into her hotel room. My 2nd floor room (under the eaves) was spacious but a bit minmalist (style over substance). The bed was comfy there was a decent walk in shower, large flatscreen tv, and interesting herbal teas with the kettle. However apart from the tiniest of wardrobes, the bottom of which was taken up with a safe for valuables, there was nowhere to unpack your clothes. There was space in the room for a chest of drawers. There were 2 steps between the bed level and bathroom level - beware if sharing a room with your partner, don't just think you can blunder to the bathroom in the night without putting a light on in case you forget the steps are there. Downstairs the bar/dining area was interestingly modernised, in what is an old building. I enjoyed my sea bass dinner, and the food prices were not as expensive as I expected (in what is not a cheap country for eating out). At breakfast, I suspect they brought me breakfast for 2 - the portion was more than I could eat (2 little glass kilner jars of yogurt, 2 croissants and 2 of each kind of bread roll) as well as scrambled eggs,

The restaurant shows very expensive prices and the personnel is not friendly at all. What a disappointment. Prices are about 30% higher than on the card. The answer was that it was an old card with old prices, why was it on our table outside? We don't come back here again.

We loved this place. Very much a charming old inn, but everything is clean and comfortable. Great location on the main street. The restaurant in the hotel is fabulous as well. Our dinner there was the most memorable of our trip. Wish we could have stayed longer.

We did not have a good experience at the hotel. The building on the outside is under renovation on the walls and ceiling, we arrived without knowing it, on no website did it say about the renovation of the building. We woke up at 8:30 am to a person working on our window and making unbearable noise. We went down to the reception at 9:00 am to complain, they apologized, but they did nothing, we had to leave. Very politely I asked if we could have a discount on the daily rate, they told us that they would talk to the manager and the answer came by email, simply that they would not give any discount. (May 2023).