Hotel Carina-pavillon

The rooms are bigger than you’d usually get in France, and the staff are consistently helpful and attentive. The restaurant serves good food at an acceptable price. But the hotel is very, very old, and there’s a strong damp smell, like ski boots. The bathroom needs updating as soon as possible: everything in our shower was broken. Cleanliness could be better too.

The staff were friendly and breakfast was okay, but that was about all I liked. The rooms felt like they were from the 70s, smelled damp, and needed a proper clean. The place looked as if it had been closed for years before someone found the keys and opened it again. There was strange stuff in some corridor cupboards, and a couple of the dark corridors felt too creepy to explore. It’s too far from town to walk, though a taxi was cheap. The next night, our group of seven stayed somewhere clean and modern for only €8 more. The crazy golf was overgrown, the tennis court was beyond repair, and I didn’t even try to get to the pool.

The only good things were the kind woman at reception and the location. Our room was dirty, with used sheets covered in hair and more hair in the shower. I changed the sheets myself using some I found in a corridor cupboard. My husband had bites on his legs, and after looking it up on Google, we thought they were caused by bedbugs. Once home, we had to take all our clothes to a laundry, where we found two live bedbugs. I emailed the hotel to explain, but they never replied. We won’t be back or recommend it.

It’s a nice place to return to. The location is quiet, just beyond the city and almost in the countryside. We stayed in a pavilion room, which wasn’t especially modern but was roomy, quiet, and bright, with large windows. The restaurant serves generous portions and has a good selection of local dishes. Breakfast was good, too, in an old-fashioned room with plants covering the windowsills. There’s parking and Wi-Fi, as well as a garden with mini-golf and a swimming pool.