“My partner and myself stayed at 1 Horizon View last week (Wed – Friday) and I felt the need to reach out as we left feeling disappointed with our stay, as we had issues 3 days in a row.”
Wednesday
We arrived at just gone 4pm after a 4 hour drive and at first couldn’t be more thrilled. We had our plan for our time in Dobwalls organised (as I had arranged activities / dinners etc elsewhere) so Wednesday was going to be our night to just stay in and enjoy ourselves, mostly looking forward to spending hours just relaxing in the hot tub as we both have been working fulltime throughout the whole pandemic. Long story short the Hot tub was unusable. It was 22 degrees or so when we arrived, (you recommend 36-38) and by the time 11.30pm had rolled around we gave it one more shot at 33 degrees and was still unusable. We were absolutely gutted.
Thursday
After shaking off the disappointment of the night before we went out to do our pre planned activities and finally came back to relax in the hot tub for a few hours. Considering the privacy the space / backyard offers we felt comfortable with changing near the doors to the outside etc. Again, long story short, out of nowhere a man appeared at the hot tub to check the chlorine. He did not knock the door, he did not shout out that he was there, we were not called / emailed / given a letter to say a man would be coming, he just appeared in the backyard an started playing with the hot tub when we had just been getting out / changing no more than 30 minutes before.
It’s safe to say this was quite shocking, and this left us paranoid and feeling like we had no privacy for the rest of the trip. This no longer felt like our little get away, we felt like anyone would be coming and going as they pleased.
Friday
By Friday morning we had once again decided to shake off the disappointments we felt the past 2 days and as we were unable to use the hot tub on Wednesday decided to have one last dip in it to try and get our monies worth before we left at 10am. You can imagine our disbelief when at 8am we went to the backdoors to go out to find pool cleaning supplies all around the hot tub. Not able to be used once more and once again someone was in our private space without warning. As we decided to just have breakfast and leave as we were now angry, it was even more disturbing that as we cooked our meal, ate at the table and tidied the place, the man was just walking around and cleaning the hot tub, all of us in full view of each other. Was he not told we checked out at 10am? Why was he here before then, almost making us feel like we were being rushed / kicked out?
The place itself was a dream, perfection almost and we cannot and will not take that away from the experience. We had absolutely everything catered to our needs and without the issues we had would be 10/10 no questions asked.
However having booked this to originally be coming Dec/Jan, and waiting so long to finally come (of course the moving dates was not your fault) but instead of cancelling and getting a refund, I paid hundreds more pounds to be able to still come, which given the choice again now I would not have.
Not only were we only able to use the main attraction 1 out of 3 days we should have had the option to use it, we felt no privacy, and no respect from the workers / the company. Why was it acceptable to have a stranger walking around in our private space 2 days in a row and not just wait until we had left? Or why weren’t we at least told?
Considering how much I ended up paying for this trip, and the shortfalls that occurred, I find the whole thing unacceptable which is so disappointing as we have had so many people reach out and ask where this beautiful place was, and we haven’t been able to recommend Horizon view due to these issues. Should these issues be resolved, or you would be willing to compensate us in a way we deem fair for the issues we’ve had, we would of course love to come back many times over, but as things stand we couldn’t be sad that this trip ended so badly.