B&B Butterfly

The B&B is clean and in a handy spot in Salve. Water is provided for guests, and the coffee machine doesn’t work. Breakfast is served at the nearby Costa d'Oro Hotel, which is owned by the same hotel, and comes as a buffet with 10 different snacks, 8 kinds of fruit juice, a liter of coffee, and yogurt. The main drawback was the dog barking day and night. The owner, Massimo, says it makes an excellent guard dog, which is rather unfortunate. It’s a beautiful B&B, but that noise was hard to ignore.

We had to cut our three-day stay short by one day because of family issues. Massimo, the manager, said he could arrange a refund for the first day and asked me to send him €70 to handle the process with Booking.com. I believed him. For three weeks he kept assuring me that he was working on the refund. When I asked for the extra €70 back, he stopped responding. I feel he was dishonest and took my money. The bed was old and very uncomfortable, there was no toilet seat, and the towels had been used. Never again. Don’t book B&B Arcobaleno, and don’t trust the positive reviews.

Giovanni was the one bright spot: a lovely person who stayed kind and managed to make guests smile even when things were difficult. My sincere thanks to him. Five stars for Giovanni, and zero for the hotel. The rest of the stay was a nightmare of poor organization and little comfort. My room was changed several times, and the owner even told me to move to another hotel miles away. The key I was given could also open another room, which felt like careless management and a risk to guests’ privacy. The property seemed abandoned, with no staff around apart from the cleaner, who was only there for a couple of hours in the morning. The front door was often left open or ajar, so it felt as if anyone could come in. When problems came up with neighbors, there was nobody to contact. Daily cleaning was perfunctory and superficial. The air conditioning in my room was broken, with its louvers missing, so cold air blew on the people sleeping opposite and made it impossible to sleep. Shower water swung from scalding hot to almost unusable; I had to turn on the sink tap to cool it. Booking described breakfast as a “buffet breakfast,” but it was actually at another hotel a few miles away. We had to go out for breakfast, then come back to wash and get ready, a major inconvenience that the property description didn’t mention.