Loch Ness Lodge Hotel

The location is superb with shops & other restaurants in proximity. It is next door to a "Nessie Experience" visitor centre which it appears to co-own along with a couple of gift & trinket shops below. The basic fabric of the exterior building is lovely & around 250 years old. The staff are friendly, the bar & restaurant is fabulous, and the food exceptional and the best we had on our whole Scottish tour.

The first puzzling thing on arrival, was that despite being a reasonably large hotel in a tourist centre, it appeared to be completely devoid of guests despite being early evening and still in season. The bar & restaurant was deserted. It is a shame to say that as the stay wore on it became apparent that this is a business which appears on its last legs. Whilst it has huge potential, the rooms and much of the rest of the hotel were last refitted in the 70's, and on a very limited budget at that point. No major room issues other than it being terribly tired/dated but essentially clean and tidy, but the showers are not fit for purpose due to just being over bath mixers being impossible to regulate temperature due to obvious variable hot water flow rates evident from handbasin taps. The second morning woke up to no hot water running in room at all, was kindly offered another room after breakfast to shower, which has similar issues with hot water flow which went completely sold after a minute or so. A partial refund was offered at checkout in compensation. This hotel no doubt has incredible potential but very obviously needs a vast amount of money spent on refurbishments. We didn't visit the co-owned attraction next door after reading reviews on other sites, and couldn't help feeling rather sorry for the staff who have to run what is very obviously a run down and semi-derelict "attraction". Overall, the whole site has a feeling of dereliction about it, and that the owners are trying to squeeze the last drops of revenue out of it before it reaches its inevitable fate. Such a terrible shame.