“Enjoyable week spent at Glenavon.”
Our first stay here and we'd be happy to book again.
Positives:
Location wonderful, magnificent views, light and spacious, kitchen basically stocked with cutlery and pots, heating good (monitored offside via Hive) - it did fail at one point but was fixed fairly quickly after reporting the issue, enclosed garden area excellent and safe for dogs. It was fun listening to seagulls sitting on the the chimney through the front room flue! 2 herons are nesting at the back of the property and it was a joy to watch them flying back and forth nest building.
Less positive:
One of the reasons we booked Glenavon was the picture of the bathroom showing a bath. My daughter loves a soak! However, we found that the bathroom had been totally refitted, bath removed and walk in shower fitted. It's a lovely bathroom, but you need to update Sykes site pictures to reflect the changes. Some of the other description is also out of date, also, such as description of twin room decoration..
Sykes email updates to ask visitors to leave the house as they found it. I've always given a good clean around at the end of all our holidays, but this time found it impossible as the Dyson hoover doesn't pick anything up - that is no exaggeration! Nothing to clean the hard floors with either. If you expect visitors to give a basic clean, please provide the wherewithall! We tried to pick up some bits of fluff etc from upstairs carpets by hand - far from ideal!
Duvets on all beds are thin - mine was 4.5 tog. Certainly not warm enough for cold weather. Furry extra blanket is provided in the double room, but twin and single didn't seem to have extra blankets. We took the ones from the downstairs front room up for extra warmth.
The refitted bathroom extractor rattles VERY noisily when windy, which it was for almost all our week. It's loud enough to keep you awake whichever bedroom you're in. This was a significant problem. A simple answer would be to stick a small strip of rubber or similar outside to prevent the flap clattering. This wouldn't stop its main function.
I dropped a tablet on the floor in the twin room and had to pull a bed aside to recover it. I was shocked at how very dirty it was under the beds. The settees are similar. Cleanliness reasonable other than that, though dusty in places.
Problem with heating going off due to boiler pressure loss and leaking radiator dealt with quickly once reported, but very stressful trying to deal with water pouring from the radiator until the 2nd plumber / engineer arrived. I missed a call from the Helpline and tried calling them repeatedly for the next hour to find out why they'd called. No answer at all. Again very stressful.
TV in double room breaking up constantly and virtually unusable. Cable issue?
There were 2 small soot falls downstairs front room during our week, probably due to high winds. We did our best to clean the sooty, gritty falls up. Does the chimney need cleaning?
I stayed in the twin room. It's a large airy space with twin beds, a basic hang rail and cloth device with pockets to store clothes. There's lots of space, to the point that the bedroom looks half finished. I would recommend adding, at the very least, a small chest of drawers or dressing table for storage. Also, the small round mirror is fitted in such a way that I, 5'8" so fairly tall, can only see from my chin upwards! Bedrooms need a decent sized mirror, in my personal opinion.
Non of the above would put us off booking again, but I'd hope a few points would be addressed.
