Detailed review by timelord
timelord(52)
Campbeltown, United Kingdom97%
If first impressions really count, this hotel comes up trumps. Set just back from the main A83 Inveraray-Campbeltown road, the Loch Fyne is a solid impressive Victorian building, with a spectacular vista over Loch Fyne itself.
The entrance and reception area are equally impressive - on a bitterly cold day there is something uniquely welcoming in a real coal fire, set below a large sweeping staircase that only needed Audrey Hepburn to set it off completely.
The receptionist was friendly & professional, with minimal formalities before issuing my room key. The room itself was Baltic as the heating had been inadvertently switched off, I was told, by the chambermaid. After 5 minutes footering around playing with the thermostat on the heater I gave up, phoned reception, and within a minute the hotel's handyman had arrived and sorted the problem.
The en-suit room was clean and provided the usual TV, trouser press & coffee/tea facilities.
However the carpet was very worn and both the bathroom shaving mirror light bulb and the free standing standard light bulb didn't work. It is these small things that so many hotels in Scotland fall down by, a great frustration to me as cumulatively it adds up to a large negative for Scottish tourism competing in the global tourist market, & is something that is 'fixable' with a little care and attention to detail.
The hotel has a solitary (free) internet connected computer and a small swimming pool, including spa facilities. I'm no great swimmer - it's the Med or bust I'm afraid! - so cannot comment personally, but colleagues have used these facilities and have given them the thumbs up. The Loch Fyne also has a beauty salon - nails, skin and so on - employing two delightful Sirens, but as your typical Scottish male I knew that such a palace of delights would never be for me & gave the entrance a wide body swerve.
I was at the Loch Fyne on business and can recommend their conference facilities. The conference room looked directly over the loch (a welcome distraction at times!) with good coffee (a welcome rarity) and a gas effect fire. My only gripe was that the hotel's laptop, most bizarrely, did not have PowerPoint.
Food. Well, lunch was satisfactory, sandwiches & soup, nicely set out but I thought the 2 sandwiches each was a tad niggardly, although this probably had more to do with the short pockets of my employer. The dinner menu was fairly limited and, well, boring - I had prawn salad, roast lamb (the type that appears on the majority of low to middle range hotels, which I am convinced has its provenance with catering firm Brake Bros) & cheese & bicuits. For extra, steak was available but I would be damned if I was going to pay £16/18 for a defrosted sirloin steak cooked by an amateur 'chef'. As I was not paying for the basic dinner I cannot give a definitive cost, but I would hazard a guess around the £20 mark. House wine came in at £12 odd, not too bad, but the same wine from the Co-op down the road would only set you back around a fiver.
Loch Fyne6
