Well, we're not long back from a 3 day stay at the Hotel Skalny, and it was an.. interesting experience.

This hotel is best compared to a wolf in sheeps clothing. The hotel is fairly new, and arriving at the hotel was very efficient and looked lovely at the foot of the hills, but this hotel has a lot of "HOWEVERS"..

Positives of hotels:

- Gorgeous Views
- Pretty New
- Comfy beds
- Good Spa
- Clean and safe feeling

So the initial views of the hotel were very positive, but scratch beneath the surface and this hotel is a bit of a nightmare. I'll tell you of our experiences in this hotel, which we will NEVER be returning to:

Everything about this hotel smells of being quickly put up, not thought through and of a bit of a poor standard.

Problems

1. The hotel is a very long away from the centre of town, about 30-40 min walk. It's downhill on the way to town, so therefore uphill on the way back. Take a taxi (cost between 15-25zl)

2. The plug in the hotel room didn't work. In fact, it protruded from the wall and only worked when you held the plug in - this was rather worrying as I thought it was going to start a fire. This in itself wasn't annoying, more of an indication of the quality of the place.

3. The shower in the bathroom just sprayed everywhere. The temperature runs between ROASTING hot and FREEZING cold when you leave it in one position, which was rather annoying.

4. A double bed is 2 single beds pushed together, with a strip of material running down the middle, but this is common in Polish hotels

5. Staff weren't overly useful - The biggest probelm was we asked the staff to mark on their map where the hotel was. The member of staff didn't know, and marked what turned out to be the wrong place on the map. In a rather hilly locatin like Zakopane, this wasn't helpful. This meant our first attempt to navigate to the city centre (navigating is the right word, because you have to go down a long long road with no footpath to get there), because the staff had marked the wrong street on the map, meant about an additional hour of walking. This was very annoying. I mean, how can staff at the hotel not know where the hotel is on their map!?

6. The hotel is surrounded by youth hostels on all sides. In fact, most buildings in a half mile radius are youth hostels. So football games went on late into the night outside our balcony. There are LOTS of youth hostels in the area.

7. Once, we came back early after a hike to look forward to the spa. This was closed, which was annoying but understandable. However it was closed as the pool wasn't working - The spa and sauna as far as we could understand were fine. We returned the next day to discover the spa was broken. Again. We returned the 3rd day and shared the spa with 6 kids. Not very relaxing.

8. The views from the balcony were really nice and peaceful and brilliant, but there's no chair to enjoy the views from.. you bring a chair from the room itself and sit on it but it's so low that you can only see wall on all side. Again, just a bit annoying and not very well thought through.

9. Breakfast was very poor, although food on a whole apart from breakfast was very good.

10. Walls were made with paper so I woke up each morning when next door had their shower.

There's also a lot of building work in the area - you may wish to check before you book if theres any work..

But what really made this stay, the "highlight", or should that be "lowlight" :

*Electrocution* of me.

When we were packing bags to leave this hotel on the last morning, I dropped an item beneath the bed and reached in to retrieve it. Beneath the bed was an EXPOSED WIRE. I discovered this when the wires touched by skin and give me a substantional electic shock. This, as you would imagine, made me (and my wife) very angry! When we checked out and I told them about my experience, they mentioned "they should fix that, that's quite dangerous" - no apology! I'm still waiting for an apology (and if someone from the hotel reads this review, that would be nice!) from the hotel for what could have very easily been a fatal accident.


All in all, we couldn't really recommend this hotel to anyone. Zakopane itself is goregous and really really worth it - we both hope to be back to Zakopane (just not at this hotel). The hotel seems to have the basics right (clean, comfy, quite new, quiet, good views), but there's just so much beneath the surface that is incredibly wrong. As mentioned, I nearly died - not an experience that normally makes you want to return to a hotel.


For the money, you can do a lot better than this hotel. Or to put in another way, for the money you couldn't do much worse than this hotel.