Hotel Merkur in Baden-Baden

This hotel is redefining absolute rock bottom in hospitality :
- Reservations : 0/10
- Front Office : 0/10
- Housekeeping : 0/10
- Maintenance : 0/10
- Spa : 0/10
- General Manager : 0/10

This is a two part review, part I is about the communications with the hotel over six weeks prior to our arrival, part II is about our first 24h at this absolutely horrible.

Here is part I which was shared with the hotel management prior to our arrival :

“please find bellow a little overview of my experience with Brenners Park hotel so far. I could have written an email at least twice as long, but decided to limit myself to the “greatest hits” of the Brenners’ staff so far…

The communication with Brenners Park Hotel regarding the reservation of our rooms and meals has been the most painful hospitality experience of my life. I have never witnessed such incompetence, chaos, and a complete mess.

Here are just a select few examples of the total amateurism of the hotel staff I have had the misfortune of communicating with:

- Room Booking Chaos: After an initial booking of three rooms, I called to add one additional room. After explaining exactly what was needed over the phone (which was very simple), I received an email where the entire reservation had been changed in ways that were absolutely never mentioned. Dates and names had been completely and randomly changed. It took me two emails and three long phone calls just to get it back to how it should have stayed initially.

- Christmas Lunch Nightmare: There are no words to describe how painful it was to book our Christmas lunch at the hotel. It took approximately three weeks, 12 emails and eight phone calls to get the confirmation for one single meal. After every email, I would receive an automated response promising a confirmation within 24 hours that would never arrive. It was only after the eighth phone call that the reservation was finally confirmed. After succeeding in confirming this one meal—which took me approximately 5 or 6 hours if you count the time for all the emails and calls—I started receiving emails from staff members saying that they were checking if they had availability for this meal and would get back to me shortly. The menu for the meal was sent to me in German (although nobody in the group speaks German), it took one week and 4 emails to finally receive an English version of this menu.

- Overview Request Failure: When asking for an overview of the entire booking to be shared with the other guests of the travel party, it was completely impossible to get an answer. After multiple requests by email, and after speaking to the reservations department at length to explain in detail what I needed and being promised that I would receive the email shortly, nothing ever arrived. Multiple calls to follow up did not change anything. It was only after talking to the Front Office Manager and getting angry for the very first time that I finally received the email—an email that was, of course, as always full of mistakes!!!!

The Brenners' staff have probably wasted close to 20 hours of my time in the course of 6 weeks; Incompetence and mismanagement cannot begin to explain what is going on in this hotel...”

Hi, we drove up from Geneva based on a phone call confirmation that our two minilop rabbits will be allowed to stay with us. Upon arrival the rabbits were denied, when we asked them to check why we were told on the phone ‘yes’, they simply said it doesn’t matter who from their team said yes to us, their policy is no rabbits, even though the room we were asking for was more than 2,000$ a night. The manager was not remorseful at all and was in fact condescending us that we would not be able to find any hotel in Baden with the rabbits, which was not true as 10 minutes later we checked into the far more warm and hospitable Maison Messmer which I would highly recommend. Hospitality comes from accommodativeness, not denying responsibility for arbitrary rules.