Guest House Le Charlot

If you're driving, this place gets expensive fast. There's no nearby parking, and at the square the limit is three hours. After that, each ticket can cost CHF100, with tickets coming every few hours. The rooms are bare minimum, with no shampoo or bath soap. There's no lift either, which makes hauling suitcases difficult for travellers.

The guesthouse was noisy, and the shutters were very hard to close. There was also no shower gel or shampoo. Before we arrived, the promised Riviera card hadn't been prepared. The fridge still had smelly cheese from a previous guest, so we didn't use it, and I don't think the room had been cleaned properly. When we brought this up with the hotel « Julien », he blamed the cleaner, didn't apologise, and made no attempt to put things right. Rude. By the end, we felt like « charlots » without a shower. I'd avoid this guesthouse.

The rooms are big and clean, and check-in at 1pm was easy, as was the midday late checkout. The location is great, too. Just be aware that the wood floors make the corridors noisy, so we were woken early by other guests leaving. The blinds don't block out the light, so bring earplugs and an eye mask.

There were four of us for two nights. The building overlooks Vevey's market Square, with a side view of the lake rather than facing it. It's a good location, and the apartment was clean and spacious, though the headroom was low. The price made the problems especially hard to accept. There were plenty of wine glasses, as you'd expect in a wine-growing area, but no corkscrew. Maybe previous guests took it, along with the frying pan. The toilet seat was broken, and although there was a folding dining table, there were no chairs. I brought some in from the balcony, not realizing they were wet from the rain. One collapsed when I sat on it. In Nestlé's home, seeing a Nespresso machine was nice, but the capsules supplied were for another kind of machine and didn't work. Vevey includes free public transport with the tourist tax, and the hotel is supposed to provide the tickets. No one met us when we arrived, and there were no completed tickets left for us. The blank ones in the communal hallway lacked our names, the hotel name, and the date, so using them raised eyebrows. The kitchen is under a sloping ceiling, with the extractor fan very low over the hob. I banged my head several times and was particularly grumpy writing this. The bedroom is up steep stairs, and the roof at the bed's edge is less than 1.5m high, so it's easy to hit your head getting out of bed. Finally, we asked the host for the WiFi code and got no reply. Absolutely shocking for the price.