Schloss Kartzow

We stayed for three nights in May and were looking forward to staying after having to cancel our trip in 2020. I have given this review a lot of thought and will try to be objective as we had a varied experience staying here. After finding an entrance to the property, there seem to be two, we parked the car and walked around to what is obviously the main entrance which was closed, there was no bell or signage so we walked around to the back terrace and entered through the open door there. Even though we had been asked to supply our expected time of arrival there didn’t seem to be anybody about and we felt uneasy about letting ourselves in unannounced. We finally found the owner who didn’t speak any English and as we didn’t have much German it turned into a rather odd exchange, it just felt very awkward. Not a warm welcome. The restaurant that is advertised as being on site was not operational so we ventured out to try and find somewhere to have dinner. On returning to the Schloss the keys that we were given to open the terrace doors would not open the lock so my husband had to ring the owner on the phone to ask her to come down and open the door for us. Not a very good start to our stay. We had a few other problems during our stay, the hairdryer in our room didn’t work and the promise of having it replaced never eventuated. They seemed to have had problems with the power as well and were having issues with the coffee machine at breakfast. The final straw was waking up on our last day there to find that there was no water. We had to ask when we went downstairs at breakfast what the problem was. There is a definite problem here with a lack of communication. Apparently there was an issue with ageing pipes nearby and the water would be turned off while it was fixed. The owners knew about the planned water shutdown but neglected to inform us the day before which would have solved the problem of us being left unprepared. A simple note under the door to forewarn us would have sufficed. Google translate would have helped with any language problems. We waited in our room for the problem to be fixed but as the time dragged on we went back downstairs and walked straight into the middle of a wedding taking place so out of respect to the couple we retreated back up to our room. Once again a little information about a planned wedding taking place would have been helpful. I actually had to ask if they had any bottled water that we could use as there was never any offer of anything to help us. The water was not reinstated until later in the day and while I understand that this can happen anywhere it was the lack of warning and communication that really annoyed us. That night after returning from having dinner out we walked in to find a private dinner party taking place in the dining room. A staff member started chatting to us pleasantly at the door until the owner came out and hung about looking anxious. The whole time that we were at the Schloss I