top of page

Holiday Inn East Kilbride - Valentines with Grandkids !! Silence is Golden or is it?


Yvonne and I ( mainly Yvonne) decided at the last minute to have a leisure weekend away with the grandkids.We had pretty specific criteria:- Hotel with leisure facilities, 1 hour or so from Glasgow as it was a Friday after work start and as cheap as possible,money in February isnt plentiful. So on the Monday the internet searching began for the Friday & Saturday later that week. It wasn't long in the search before it became obvious that we were trying to book Valentine's weekend. A couple of old romantics like us had forgot that little detail. Choices with availability were limited and those that were available were pricey !!

After a day or so searching and prompted by an email advert we tried www.myhotelbreak.com the new website of classic hotels. Lo and behold we found the holiday inn East Kilbride advertised for two nights for the 4 of us B&B with dinner on one night for the grand sum of £139 !! hard to believe the price and it was available so we booked pronto.

On arrival check in was efficient and we were checked in to our room a large family room with king size bed and a sofa bed for the kids, ideal for us. Our plan was to have dinner in the hotel restaurant on the friday followed by games in the room (Yvonne had bought some games, colouring books etc and bizarrely toy glider planes for each of us to build and fly!)

Off to dinner we went around 6pm and were met very pleasantly by the restaurant staff who offered us a choice of menus. On all menus the kids would eat free as they were accompanied by Adult hotel guests and there was also a special couples menu which offered 3 courses each and a bottle of wine for £40. As we were on a dinner rate we were further advised that if we opted for the couple offer we would get a £36 allowance...wow....opt for this we did and i have to say the food and service was very good.

After dinner around 7:30pm we retired to the room to fly our gliders and play our games. Unfortunately the fun was just beginning. At 8:45pm we receievd a call from reception to say they had received a complaint about noise from a guest below who was apparently decanted to the hotel from his flooded property and was working shifts and needed to sleep in the evening. We explained we were in a family room and just playing with the kids although we did apologise and agreed to keep the noise down. At that point we stopped the games and reverted to colouring in books and TV. An hour later we got another call to advise the guest had complained another few times. We explained we were not creating any noise beyond a normal family walking about the room and perhaps the hotel needed to rethink their allocation policy of housing such guests below family rooms. Yvonne got pretty upset requesting the receptionist advise what she would like us to do we were prepared to move rooms although the upset had by now clearly affected our weekend and we let the receptionist know this pointing out that all the advertising literature around the hotel and posted in the lifts etc was aimed at family breaks and family fun.

During the night a note was pushed under our door from the duty manager apologising for the upset and asking if we could speak after breakfast to try and resolve matters, After breakfast the duty manager approached us and explained that the guest below had agreed to move room and the hotel were very sorry for the upset caused admitting that the hotel had got it wrong in their allocation of the rooms. By way of apology they invited us to afternoon tea as their guest which we were happy to accept.

After breakfast we set off for the leisure club. Leisure facilities include swimming pool, sauna, jacuzzi, steam room and Gym although we contented ourselves with the pool which was very enjoyable. The facilities are more than adequate even although they are not brand new, my only quibble would be that the changing rooms were a bit cold.

We arrived for afternoon tea as planned and found they had pulled out all the stops, reserving us an area of the lounge which was festooned with books, soft toys and games as gifts for emma our 3 year old grand daughter and a box of chocolates for Yvonne as well as a full monty afternoon tea selection of sandwiches, savouries and cakes. A very nice touch.

All in all this was a nice stay at incredible value soured somewhat by our friday night exeperience which if left unchecked would have certainly resulted in a below par rating however given the genuine attempts to address the issue and the extra mile of the duty manager in trying to make things right i'm more than happy to rate this stay as 8 out of 10. Without the drama and based purely on the stay and value i would probably have plumped for a 7 out of 10 so it goes to show recovery of a situation in the right way can be a positive outcome for an organisation.


bottom of page