Downtown Blue Ridge Holidays from £855

Clean and nice size rooms. Staff were super helpful and friendly. Parking was easy.

The property is beautiful and has a lot of untapped potential. However, the website is very deceiving. There are 3 lakes with fishing, paddle boarding, canoeing, and kayaking available. There is archery and shooting for an extra cost. However, horseback riding and ATV's are no longer available (apparently for years), although the website still mentions both. The restaurant was closed as there is no chef at this time and staff had no idea when it would reopen. The only place to eat was the little store with coffee, snacks, and a few refrigerated sandwiches, but no breakfast or dinners as per the website. There is also a limited pool-side menu. We had to drive to Serenby to eat, which was quite an inconvenience. Staff were super friendly and did everything possible to make our stay enjoyable. As a make up for not having a restaurant, we were given a complementary golf cart for a day. The room and bathroom were very spacious and clean, but we did not get any room service during our stay. The buildings could really use some paint as the lakeside side of the cottages/hotel has peeling paint and the screened-in porches have lots of broken parts. Overall, we enjoyed the outdoors with hiking and lake activities. However, you can't call something a RESORT without having full service, all the resort amenities, and a restaurant. Also, the website needs to be updated to reflect the current state of the property. Not exactly the pampered weekend we were expecting.

The unit itself was clean, well-designed, and in a great location — walkable to a solid restaurant on-site, and security presence felt constant and reassuring. That said, a few things need attention: • AC was broken from day one. I reported it that evening when I noticed as I was hot trying to go to bed. Someone finally came the NEXT evening, around 7–8pm, to try to cool it down, but it was never properly fixed. Then a room change was suggested, after complaining it still wasn’t fixed, maybe an hour and a half later but I was exhausted as I was at a conference all day • Valet was consistently slow, not because of the driver, but because only one person was covering the whole line. That backs up traffic on the street and leaves guests double parking just to wait. • Front desk was understaffed most of my stay, one person for most hours, which meant long check-in waits even when it wasn’t busy. One fix that would solve a lot at once: the valet wears the hotel’s branding but operates as a separate company, folding that under the hotel’s own staffing would remove a lot of the friction guests (and the team) are dealing with. The elevator could also use a regular air freshener. I could tell the on site team was stretched thin, and that pressure clearly passes down to guests. The bones of this place are great it just needs enough staff to back up what the brand promises.