Loch Shiel Hotel

This is a welcoming hotel. It is also a pub with plenty of locals and there is good interaction between the locals and the guests. We had a loch view room - the loch is a bit further than we'd expected but it is still a great view of the mountains and a ribbon of water. The room was good - lacked a bit of storage - and the bathroom was quite modern. The hotel is run by a small staff - they are very friendly & always busy but you still get service with a smile. We are there on both nights (there isn't really anywhere near) - limited menu but fresh & good food. Breakfast is freshly cooked too. Hotel is difficult to contact - I sent an email to reserve a table (no reply); my wife rang to reserve a table but they still had no record of it when we arrived! The loch is about 400m down the track - worth the walk for stunning sunset views (& midges)

Three weeks in advance we booked a deluxe room with double bed and loch views for our 52nd wedding anniversary. When we arrived the assistant manager spent an hour running around looking for keys, asking the staff if they were sleeping in any of the rooms and finally informed us that the only room they had available was a tiny attic room with two single beds above the smoking area for the hotel. The window had been left open so the room stank of cigarette smoke, the beds were hard and creaky and, although my husband and I are both quite small people, we had to turn sideways and ease around the door to get into the tiny shower room. The "amenities" consisted of two earl grey tea bags in a filthy box, two tiny thimbles of non-dairy milk and two broken biscuits. There was a double socket in the room with a four way, unswtitched extension which the television was plugged into but it was quite warm so we unplugged it. We didn't dare to use it. The food at this hotel was disgusting. We ordered the seafood platter. The waiter informed us that we couldn't order a starter because the platter was so large. We were bitterly disappointed to be served sadly defrosting prawns in a watery Marie Rose sauce, the cream and wine sauce for the mussels had curdled but about half of the mussels hadn't opened anyway. The whitebait were not the tiny, crispy morsels one might expect, instead the were a good three inches of bitter bones and fins. The langoustines were still frozen. The "artisanal bread basket" turned out to be two slices of under baked, bake-it-at-home baguette. We asked for a dessert menu but the waiter ignored us, looked at what what left on the table and said "I'll just leave you to that for a while". We actually went to bed hungry. We had booked and paid a huge amount of money (for us, it was supposed to be a special occasion) for two nights, we went home after the first one. We didn't stay for the breakfast.

In many ways more like B&B rather than hotel. Public bar downstairs. Breakfast very nice and owner friendly and helpful. Set in a small village with very nice surrounding countryside. My only criticism would be that it was quite expensive for a B&B.