Stayed here with my wife during a 3-week training at the ITC-ILO in Turin. Very poor service in general, should not be rated 5-stars.
By far the worst experience below is when the hotel staffs picked up our laundry, lost it, and tried to convince us that we never sent the clothes for the laundry service in the first place.
List of things that went wrong during our 19 day stay:
1. At check-in, we had 4 large suitcases, and there was no porter to help with the bags, and the receptionist did not show us to our room.
2. Upon check-out, same story – I had to go to the lobby to take the luggage cart in the lobby to our room on the third floor. On the trip up to the room and back down, I passed 2-3 hotel staffs including the concierge, but I did not receive any offers to help with the luggage.
3. The receptionist we met at check-in could not speak English. She told us to wait 3 hours with our questions and ask her colleague who hadn’t showed up to work yet.
4. Her English-speaking colleague was not very helpful. Besides the nearby shopping mall, he could not recommend any additional places for us to dine. He seemed to not know the area very well and one of my journeys when exploring different routes to the training center led me to a not-so-good part of town. The recommended bus #1 took me past the 8 Gallery shopping center from the hotel and dropped me off nearly 1 kilometer from my destination. The bus ride and walk were not pleasant and did not feel safe. Each time I had a question about directions, he would use Google Maps which is something I could have done from home.
5. I was fined 25 Euros on the bus by an attendant because while I was told where to buy a bus ticket and where the bus stop was, I was not advised I needed to “validate” the ticket on the bus. I felt that this information should have been offered by the receptionist who gave me instructions on how/where to take the bus.
6. Half of the reception staff did not speak English throughout our stay. When we would ask them for something, instead of admitting they didn’t understand, they would confidently say “okay,” and then completely ignore our request.
7. 3 out of 4 requests for room service required us to make follow-up calls after 30 minutes
8. The house keeper often ignored the “Avanti/Stop” sign we hung on the door and would enter the room on days when my wife wanted to sleep in
9. House keeper took wine glasses that we had purchased for personal use. The hotel was then unable to locate them, so they offered us used glasses from the hotel restaurant instead.
10. Rooms were very dusty throughout the entire stay.
11. Air conditioning was spotty – this was not due to the “automatic temperature” function that would switch the AC motor on/off – the entire AC system would randomly switch to off in the middle of the night
12. Internet fees sold at the reception desk does not match the automated browser pop-up screen (reception is cheaper), making it less convenient for guests to use the internet service (must walk to the receptionist and request a password).
13. Laundry service:
a. Very bad service providers – we threw away most of the laundry that was washed by the AC Torino hotel because the colors came back old/faded on even the new items we had recently purchased.
b. Laundry was returned piecemeal – for example, we would submit 5 pieces of laundry one day, and on the next day we would receive 3 pieces back - the remaining 2 pieces would arrive over the next couple of days. This made tracking of our laundry extremely difficult. On our last day packing our bags, we discovered that one entire set of clothes was lost.
c. We would often have staff knocking on our door at 9pm or later to drop-off finished laundry instead of the published 7pm time published on the laundry form.
d. Lost laundry:
i. On the day of check-out (August 5th), while packing our bags we discovered that one of the clothing lots we sent for laundry service had not been returned. We immediately phoned the front desk (staff was a gentleman named Christian)
ii. After 30 minutes of informing him our laundry was missing, we had to go downstairs to check (we did not get a return call) if they had followed up. We were simply told that they could not locate our laundry.
iii. They spent 30 minutes trying to locate where our laundry was.
iv. They spent the next 60-90 minutes trying to convince us that we never submitted the laundry for cleaning.
v. The reception appears to have a closed-loop recording device/camera, but apparently was unable to review the tapes to confirm which housekeeping staff picked up our laundry.
vi. We eventually figured out that the hotel did not have any record of our laundry because the hotel does not keep a carbon copy of the laundry form, and a neither was a copy left in the room when they picked up the laundry bag.
vii. They finally admitted the laundry bag we submitted for cleaning on Monday, August 1st was completely lost (we showed photos of the clothes we knew to be missing from our camera) but said they could not help us but to say “sorry.”
viii. They eventually gave us measly $58 Euros credit on our laundry service (15% discount of the laundry bill) – yet the clothes they lost was worth at least $400 Euros. One of the jackets was brand new and cost nearly 300 Euros. We purchased it on this trip and had not even requested the TAX/VAT refund yet – I still have the receipt. The rest of the items lost were designer jeans and 3 brand-name shirts.
Overall we felt that the hotel building itself is nice, as were the morning restaurant staff. The benefit of complimentary minibar was also a nice touch. However, service is critical in the hotel industry, especially for a hotel that is to be rated “5-stars.” We were extremely disappointed with the quality of the service. Stay somewhere else.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
