Ecchinswell Vacation Packages

The good: Nice hotel and lovely attentive staff. The bad: Probably my incorrect expectations but was expecting room AC for a 4* The ugly: Brave the unlit path, if you dare, to get to the Chineham shopping centre. No fault of the hotel but Hampshire County Council should sort this out as its an accident waiting to happen!

Excellent location, comfortable rooms. We didnt eat there (there is lots of choice close by in Winchester....)

Clean room, breakfast,staff all very good

With a huge gym and a 20m swimming pool it is quite a rare find in the area. Avid swimmers note, though, that pool is 30-31 C temperature so vigorous swim in freestyle may have to be cut back due to overheating if used to normal lane swimming temperatures. Understandable, though, as it is used by non-hotel residents & kids so it has to be warmer. Staff were extremely helpful, food menu in the "restaurant" was quite good and breakfast buffet was decent. I had to put "restaurant" in double quotes, and main reason for lowering score: it is a sports bar with astonishing noise levels from the external "clientele" heard on Fri and Saturday evenings. Obviously good revenue stream for the hotel to have locals pop in for shockingly loud vocalisation, but... their absolute lack of basic manners were a novelty. Clearly something attracts type of people who feel entitled to treat it as their literally deafening local pub. I am getting old, but have *never* had hotel dinners in such settings. One sidenote about parking: currently there is a building site on the premises. They occupy large chunk of the large parking lot - so, having paid for parking with the room, it was quite stunning to find that there was ZERO provision or even most basic practical schemes to ensure hotel guests have any priority for parking. All the myriad externals who come to the gym and to shout in the "restaurant" fill up the parking lot and hotel guests can hunt around trying their luck.

Disappointing that extra charges for amenities were applied. Hotel location is not great.