We booked a two night stay far in advance, to stay one full day on Stromboli. When we arrived, they told us there was a problem with our room and they wanted to move us to another room for the first night. The problem was supposedly a broken AC, but when we told them that we don’t use it anyway, the room was still not available for us.
They didn’t hear or understand our complaint, that for us it makes a huge difference between having a place for 2 nights, and having to pack/unpack and checkout/checkin in the single day we have.
They didn’t allow us to stay in that alternative accommodation for both nights and also didn’t agree on extended checkout times. They wouldn’t call the hotel manager to deal with us, and essentially all they offered as compensation was a drink at the cafe. This is all together just a terrible treatment and such poor quality of service in dealing with such an issue. To be fair, the island was completely booked out on that weekend - but we booked early and don’t agree that we should be the victims of the overbooking.
The alternative room we got was a really beautiful appartement/house nearby - but the shower was only cold, and even worse, the drain was totally jammed so that we spent 1 hour and all our towels to defend the flood. Not their fault much, but didn’t contribute to our happiness.
Worse was the switch of the rooms. They asked us to leave the alternative room at 10:00, and given the promise that our new room in the hotel will be ready by 11:00, we did NOT refuse to checkout the alternative room until we got the new room, which we really should have done. But nice as we are, we behaved and checked out. In the following, they let us wait longer and longer for the room, and didn’t understand that we needed the room to unpack, get changed, get organized, in order to get the day started. Instead we waited until 12:30 in the cafe, until we got the room.
When we checked out on the next day, there were no apologies and no willingness for refunds or other ways of compensation.
Essentially, the hotel and room is a really nice play to stay. Our room had access to the terrasse in the back, through which the room could also be accessed from outside. It would have been a really nice stay with an excellent location, if they hadn’t messed up our booking.