Ansitz Velseck-Residence Hotel

The food was delicious, the rooms beautiful, and the peace and quiet was blissful. With wonderful views and such friendly service, we felt pampered like royalty. The owner was very nice, and the Carezza ski slope is close by. I highly recommend this hotel.

The building, architecture, materials, and location all look impressive, and the swimming pool is striking, though a little cold. But a stay depends on more than the property itself. Hospitality is what matters most, and that’s where Ansitz Velseck failed badly for us. The owner struck us as strongly opinionated, arrogant, and rude. We had planned a full week there with my family, but after two nights we couldn’t stand staying any longer and left.

The hotel itself is nice, but our experience with the owner was so bad that we left early. I wouldn’t recommend it. The road up is a narrow, poor-quality lane about 1.5 km long, always beside a steep drop. We were lucky not to meet anyone coming the other way on the few occasions we crossed it. I’d asked the owner about the road beforehand, and he said it was fine and well maintained. I can’t imagine how it is when it snows. People are taking a risk. The parking area is very muddy too. When you get out of the car, your shoes sink in, and there’s nowhere to clean them. When we arrived, the owner hurried us to the restaurant because he said it was closing. We asked him to translate the menu, which was only in Italian and German, and he told us to use Google. He added that when he’d visited our country, the menus there hadn’t been in Italian. He also made ironic comments that people where we come from get up and go to work late, said he didn’t think our food was anything special, and that he wasn’t impressed by the sea. We’d booked two Lux Panorama Suites, but the beautiful rooms didn’t feel warm when we went in. The owner said they should be OK and that we were up in the mountains. Even the bathroom heating elements for drying towels only ran for a limited time. I wonder if you have to come to a four-star hotel to test your ability to live in the mountains. There was no room cleaning service, and at the end we had to pay extra for cleaning each room. For breakfast, the owner rushed us to arrive before 9am, saying we should go to the mountains after that. It definitely didn’t feel like a four-star hotel breakfast: only cold items, most of them supermarket products. Even the chamomile tea bags were a supermarket brand, not an original brand. It felt like he was trying to save every cent. Later, when we asked him to open the outdoor pool so we could swim, he acted as though he was doing us a favor, even though it was something we were paying for. He said he wanted to be environmentally sustainable, but I guessed he was talking about his wallet whenever he mentioned the “environment”. The next evening, my wife wanted to sit near the nice window area of the restaurant, but it was cold, so she asked the owner to raise the temperature. He told her to move to the inner part of the restaurant. His “environmental” wallet concerns seemed to be catching up again. He made a mistake with the order and blamed my wife for it. He never spent time telling us what we could visit or do nearby, or showed any interest in doing so. We never felt welcome. The only thing he kept pressing us about was whether we’d have dinner, since he had to make arrangements for the chef. The food was tasty, though, and I guess the cats that seemed to go in and out of the kitchen freely all day would agree. What looked like a beautiful place turned out to feel like a tourist trap to us. One last tip if you still go: when booking a room, avoid the one with a fully transparent glass door in front of the toilet. Enough with modernity, I’d rather have decency.

We spent a week here exploring the Dolomites, and really enjoyed our spacious apartment. It was well equipped for cooking in the evenings, with plenty of storage, a large bathroom, and a fabulous mountain view. The grounds were lovely, with green grass, flowers, and even a pond. Breakfast mixed traditional German and Italian items, the wait staff were very friendly, and there was access to a laundry room. The host has an interesting, very opinionated personality and might come across the wrong way. In his own way, though, he was helpful and accommodating. We loved our stay and would come back.