Hotel Pilar in Antwerp

Excellently located opposite The Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA), the sunny terrace of Hotel Pilar looks welcoming. However, although pleasant and courteous the service was slow, and the food mediocre. My friend's meatloaf was acceptable, but my Shrimp Croquettes were not: composed of a slimy brown sauce, deep-fried, the two small croquettes (20€) had very little to do with shrimps, and a great deal to do with processed food. Disappointing.

The location is good. The front desk is casual... not much service. Everything else is fine. The worst thing is that the bed sheets are stained. The hotel did not apologize at all. TripAdvisor helped to solve the problem.

We were disappointed. We found the staff friendly and willing to help but were very unhappy with certain aspects of both the layout of the rooms and the standard of maintenance. In this connection, we were first taken to a room with one, rather dilapidated, cold water tap in the washhand basin (no hot water), a badly fitted toilet seat and a lack of space for clothes. To be fair, following our complaints, we were given a much better room. Even here though, the toilet seat was unaffixed on one side, so slid around, the main ceiling light was not working, the slot for inserting the room key card, and thus activating the lights, was broken so that on one occasion the card slipped out and extinguished all the lights, and the door into the room, like other doors in the hotel, was difficult to close. As to layout, a lot of space was taken up by a frankly superfluous bath, there was far too little space around the washhand basin for essential toiletries, the sink’s outflow system was either inefficient or blocked and the design was such that water from the tap tended to spurt onto the person concerned, and there was a general lack of storage space, typified by totally inadequate bedside tables. There are a number of other criticisms I could level but I hope the point is made. This is largely a management rather than a staff problem. A potentially very nice (and otherwise comfortable) hotel is spoilt by a number of defects, some of which require changes to the rooms’ layout but others simply call for regular maintenance checks to prevent defects before they occur.