Shortly before 1pm on Sept 1st we saw a sign to a Movenpick hotel, & my wife said "We haven't stayed in one of those, have we?", & I said that, in all our travels round the world, we hadn't. Minutes later our car was written off as some guy tried doing a U-turn & crashed into us.
After all the misery & official stuff was over at about 5pm we finally got a hire car, & the lovely lady at the car rental office 'phoned Movenpick to book us a room. They said they were very busy, so we'd have to take a room at what they termed 'business rate'. In no position to argue, we accepted.
By the time we finished with the police, we were tired, dirty, shocked, grazed & bruised.
We drove up the hill to this hotel at Egerkingen, ironically within a few hundred metres of the crash site, & took a ticket at the barrier........
We entered the large, glitzy & noisy lobby just as a couple of coachloads of tourists were swilling about, although they weren't at the reception desk, which was manned by two or three young women. We were ignored as they attended to others who seemed to be changing money, & weren't booking in. We finally spoke to a girl, told her who we were, & that we had a late reservation, & got a key. On bringing our bags from the car, we found that there was only one of the two lifts working, & that staff were using it to move large trolleys of luggage belonging to the coach-parties. We got up to Rm 330 & went in. The facilities were very much the norm for middling hotels of this type. Two queen beds, safe, chair, easy(ish) chair, TV (didn't use it) & a bathroom with a counter with basin set in, large mirror above, toilet, & bath with shower over.
Our first impression was that it was all quite small. We puzzled over the power socket, which was a composite thing, & finally boiled the kettle. We decided to go straight down to get something to eat as we'd not eaten since breakfast on a traumatic day.
We chose to eat in the part of the catering section devoted to Italian-style food, & had a fairly large bowl of Spaghetti Carbonara & two beers each. Price: 64.40SF.

Back in the room, we showered, discovering that, as there was no extractor system, the mirror swiftly steamed up. I dropped a coin on the floor, &, in looking for it, discovered that vacuuming under the beds wasn't a high priority for housekeeping. Neither was dusting, judging by the TV & the dado rail. As it was quite hot in the room we set the air conditioning controls to coolest & found it had no noticeable effect. The beds were quite comfortable, so we slept reasonably well with the window open.
In the morning we got ready to leave, & went down in the only lift to breakfast. The spread was good, although we were obviously latecomers, & quite a lot of the hot food had gone. The early bird obviously gets the worm! Unfortunately, the enormity of our problems depressed our appetites, & we couldn't do it justice.
On checking out, we paid the bill, & got a ticket to raise the car-park barrier. This, we were told, would be an extra 5SF on our bill.........

So, what of Movenpick, which likes to portray itself as rather upmarket? Compared to the Pan Pacific in Singapore, for instance, it was a pretentious little place, & even compared to the family-run hotel we stayed in whilst in Munich it still didn't measure up.

We thought the front desk staff unprofessional in their attitude, that only one lift in action was something that should have been fixed immediately, & that the air-con in the room should have worked properly. We thought that the food was expensive, as £40 for a couple of bowls of spaghetti & 4 glasses of beer was not cheap. We thought that £220 for a night in a small room in an impersonal hotel was entirely too much, & we thought that the final, gratuitous insult of charging guests to park in their own car-park was utterly indefensible.
On our way down the road to collect a few belongings from our wrecked car we passed a Comfort Inn. Talk about 20/20 hindsight! I have filled in a customer survey that was e-mailed to me by the hotel, & they got a shorter version of this report.
So, from not having stayed at a Movenpick hotel before, we can safely say that this was the only time we ever will. Avoid, unless you really have money to burn.