Hotel Al Campanile - Baveno

This hotel looks lovely and stylish but scratch the surface and there are numerous problems and issues with it. It’s clear the owning company has not tested the hotel as a tourist to see what’s wrong. It is style over function. We are a family of 3 who do 2 or 3 week driving trips round Europe. Therefore we have quite a lot of luggage and a travel fridge with drinks and some breakfast food items for me who is allergic to certain food. On getting into our room, we see that there is a huge list of Forbidden things listed. Forbidden to plug in your own appliances. So I can’t plug the fridge in. Forbidden to use the in room fridge. This is an Apart-Hotel so our expectation is that the room is set up so we can eat and cook in there if needed. You can’t. The “kitchen” is locked and is an extra £20 a day. On checking, that is mentioned on *********** but we missed the small print However if you eat in your room you get charged an extra £35 cleaning fee. We booked specifically because it advertised a washing machine. On using the machine we found it was broken. We asked 2 staff members to help. Nothing came of it. The - I presume manager - was then cross because she said we needed to ask to use the machine. We had asked. At check out we found out we’d been charged €30 to use a broken washing machine once. That’s absurd. The room is totally impractical in many other ways. There are only 8 hangers in the wardrobe for a “suite” for 4 people. There are no drawers. The bedside tables are tiny with no storage - style over function. Our clothes had to be dumped in piles on the open shelves in the bedroom. There is virtually nowhere to hang anything to dry like towels or beach towels. It is Forbidden to dry towels on the balcony. The shower again is style over function. It’s a “rain shower” with a huge ceiling shower. Looks great. Doesn’t work very well. The water is so spread out it takes ages to actually get wet. Then the shower tray is so shallow that the water spills over the edge onto the floor. There’s a strict time limit to check in otherwise you get charged. The parking is expensive. The wi-fi is virtually unusable it’s so slow and patchy. The tea and coffee making facility was very basic and the instant coffee sachets (you get 2) were not replenished. Cups weren’t washed. Fluff and dust on the shelves. And finally - the absolutely horrendous noise at breakfast because the plastic chairs that are on the plastic floor make a terrible noise when they are dragged in and out. And because it’s a buffet breakfast, people are up down, up down. Breakfast room is small and stuffy too so breakfast was a “get in and get out as quickly as possible” situation. I am not a picky customer. I am not used to expensive hotels. And I’ll forgive certain things. But so much about this hotel is grating that altogether it’s just not acceptable. On the plus side - the location of the hotel is great - a very small walk into Baveno. A