Wales, Pwllheli, Ash Lodge

When I first booked this wooden lodge on the Welcome Cottages site, I noted that there were 2 sites that carried the same picture. This got the alarm bells ringing so I phoned Welcome Cottages up to see if they had any internal photos of the lodge... No. I really should have stopped at this point and just looked for another site but I carried on thinking that it should be similar to other lodges I've stayed in. What a mistake that was.

The family and I were very excited when we arrived at the gated entrance to the site. Lawns immaculate, small beautiful swimming pool to the right, a gym inside the information/ reception centre and well built GRP luxury cabins to the left and right of the lovely brick paved road we travelled down. We thought that the pictures in the Welcome Cottages site were of the other lodge site and were looking now forward to a special holiday... Think again!

We then proceeded down the road onto a track where the wooden lodges came into view. Damm, no luxury now. The real shock about this place was the inside of Ash Lodge. It was awful. The place, although clean, was extremely dated and tired. The fixtures in the bathroom summed up just how bad it was with a '70's marine blue toilet suite, noisy toilet flush, an electric shower you had to run around in to get wet and worst of all, it stank of damp. Not just the toilet, the whole place. Getting to sleep was not fun going into damp sheets. On a H&S point of view, I had to tell and demonstrate to the family how to undo the window hinges on the antiquated windows to let themselves out. If there had been a fire, there were no instructions on fire evacuation at all and the electric heater right next to the shower was a bit worrying. We were so fed up by day 4 that we left on day 5 to stay with friends. I know I should have complained at the time but we were only staying a week and I doubt that any amount of complaining would have got us into those luxury lodges that built up so much false hope anyway.

Apart from this, the lodge came equipped with a 14" TV with built in VCR, a stereo and DVD player. The TV had to be re-tuned , there was no channel 5 and no digital signal despite Wales changing in October to all digital TV. This just re-inforced our opinion of either the owner or the site operators who were obviously concentrating on the higher end of the market and leaving these lodges to run down. No WiFi either!

This lodge and by the look of the similar lodges on this site, should be avoided at all cost.

The only reason it was not given a 1 star was because it was clean and the surrounding grounds were actually quite good for the kids... the free parts that is; you had to pay for the swimming pool (£10/week/adult, £5/week/child)