Anatol in Merano

A hotel for old germans in large groups and wortless for everybody else…. No food, far from Merano and nobody speaks anything else then German… Even if the hotel supposed to be in Italia… To bad because the place is beautiful

Me and my wife stayed at this place for 4 nights, booked through an online portal 3 weeks before our stay at the end of August 21.

All in all, it's a decent place and somewhat on par with others in the region/country (but not with broader and global standards). But unfortunately we had a very unprofessional check-in experience. We did not get our booked and prepaid room category (a junior suite), but only a lower one (a deluxe room for disabled people right above the noisy bar). The lady apparently in charge told us that the booking portals had overbooked this particular room category and that we should contact our booking portal to get a refund - all despite us having a confirmed reservation and voucher for the junior suite category.

Needless to say that such a behavior (even if the story about the booking portal was true) is very poor customer service, highly unprofessional and shows how little they cared.

Nevertheless (or maybe because of what happened), the staff was very friendly for the remainder of our stay. While we appreciated the staff's friendliness, it couldn't undo our bad check-in experience and ”violation of contract". In addition, there were a number of other things noted below which - in accumulation - made our overall stay not worth the price we paid, and were not meeting the usual experience of a basic 4 star hotel. We are well traveled and frequently stay at no-star to 5 star hotels all over the world.

Pros:
- Quiet location at Meran's hillside
- Friendly staff who mostly give their best
- Free parking on premises
- Decent food
- Seems newly renovated

Cons:
- Highly unprofessional check-in experience, downgrade of a prepaid accommodation without any form of compensation
- Very basic room setup for a 4 star hotel (more like 2 star), i.e. not even paper and pen, any tourism/regional information or even bathroom towel hangers or hooks
- Major and consistent wifi connectivity and quality issues throughout the stay
- Saggy mattresses which bent through even below the bed frame and caused back pain (and we're not big people - I'm 72kg and my wife is 50kg)
- Inconsistent and not enforced covid safety measures

Awful - some of the staff were rude and constantly talking about us to other guests, they gave us a double room when we asked for a twin, couldn’t accommodate dietary requirements... they ruined Christmas for us.