“Clean rooms.... bad food”
Stayed in this hotel for 4 nights on Newmarket Holidays' Seven Cities of Italy Tour. Before we got there our guide warned us not to compare this hotel with the one we had previously stayed in at Lake Garda because by law in Tuscany the heating is turned off in May so the rooms would be cold and because they give you cotton sheets to dry yourself with, rather than towels as they are considered to be more hygenic. As it turned out we had a lovely room with a decent bathroom, carpet and 2 balconies so couldn't grumble and we did have proper towels for half of our stay. Our fellow travellers were not so lucky. They said the marble floors were cold (extra blankets were needed as rooms were cold) and many had no balcony. It seems that odd numbered floors have carpet (we were on 3rd floor), even numbers have marble floors. The food was my only complaint. Breakfast was dreadful - the tea is ready-made in a boiler and is grey in colour and weak as dishwater with no taste, coffee was rough, the milk is the same awful sweet UHT stuff that you usually get in Europe, the cheap cornflakes are awful and of course no toast. I don't mind continental breakfasts but you expect a decent cup of tea or coffee and nice bread. It is a set dinner menu - soup to start, then pasta (invariably dried pasta with tomato sauce), then meat or fish with salad then dessert. I am a vegetarian and was given an omelette one night, a deep fried mozzarella sandwich (!) on the second and half a tomato, courgette and red pepper with cheese melted on them on the last night. We'd given up on the 3rd night and gone to eat out, but be warned there is nothing in Chianciano Terme (apart from the spas). There are no restaurants in the new town, only a snack/icecream bar where we did have a nice lasagne but it was a small snack-sized portion. There are no bars in the centre of the new town apart from the snack bar where we had our lasagne. All the shops close early so by evening the place is dead. On the last night the hotel food was better (for the meat eaters) and comprised of 5 huge courses which no one could finish (weird cheese bread with sliced meat, then soup, then lasagne, then sliced roast pork and gravy which the chef came out to carve, then slices of a huge gateau which was brought out with sparklers in it, served with a glass of Brut. The hotel has a pool (not that we would have had time to use it due to our hectic timetable) but it wasn't open in May. The old town is pleasant but tiny and there are apparently restaurants near there, close to the co-op supermarket. We had a wonderful time on this holiday because of the places we visited (Florence, Siena, San Gimignano, Assisi, Rome) and it was very convenient being driven to each place and offered guided tours and excursions. The hotel food was very disappointing, but I didn't expect much from a 3 star hotel so it didn't spoil my holiday.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
