Camping La Vallee

J’aimerais connaître le rapport entre la photo de présentation et le camping apparemment situé dans un quartier industriel du havre, il y en a qui vont être déçu !!

Neither of the two owners have any of the wonderful charm, elegance or beauty of this incredible pretty, vast camp site on the edge of Houlgate, Normandy. We found them insulting and unpleasant toward guests including us. We met the female of this grim duo on arrival when she turned us away about 9pm having arrived a day earlier than we’d booked through Yelloh for. We met the male noon the next day. They seem blissfully unaware that they are in the hospitality industry, supposedly. Yelloh boasts that it provides guests with ‘open air hotels’ giving great experiences. Perhaps it’s a revelation for them as Yelloh ambassadors to know that it’s not spelt ‘hostility’. We didn’t get off to a good start having arrived an evening early. Seemingly neither owner can cope well with such unplanned events, so if you’ve a crisis they won’t be of much help to you, unless you can phone your crisis ahead for them in advance. Despite this being a really vast site, a multi million euro investment, populated with tents & mobile homes by the hundred, with many empty tents & mobile homes and two very tired customers, very happy to pay, these ‘business’ people in the hospitality industry couldn’t help us; just a shrug of her sloping shoulders with the palms of her open hands gesturing upward. So off we drove to a wonderful Ibis budget hotel in the countryside in nearby Dives, courtesy of our Garmin sat nav, to find graceful and gracious owners who understand hospitality and we certainly paid them far less for the night than we would have paid in La Vallee. We highly recommend this Ibis at a mere £52 a night with free wifi and a beautiful Japanese garden next to a Lidl and 5 minutes drive to a supermarket and a Mc Donald’s. We were told by the female owner in La Vallee to come back at 11am next morning, but we arrived at noon to find it was closed for a two hour lunch; now I’ve never experienced any other hotel experience open air or otherwise that effectively shuts its guests out for 2 hours at midday. Yet here we found a big business in the hospitality industry shut up tighter than a prison for two hours in the middle of the day on the premise that’s it’s not yet the 7 weeks out of 52 that’s high season — only 9% of the year when it is open and it’s completely closed for about 5 months. We fell into the other 91%. 21^st century hospitality in the first world, apparently in a recession apparently an open air hotel that patently can’t manage a staffed staggered lunch time as hotels do to suit sophisticated and discernible customers who make pay days. Yelloh’s comparison with hotel experiences just evaporated here. The many guests arriving here having to plan round 2 owners. You couldn’t make it up. This place is not a sideline in some farmer’s field it’s big business. We were about to leave again at about 12:15 when the female owner appeared before us only to chastise us for not arriving at 11am, telling us to come back later, this time at 2pm. Her charmless partner then joined to assist her. We had seen him loitering about near reception but we did not know who he was at first, as he had just ignored us for several minutes as he idly loitered until a few minutes after she appeared to begin grumbling. Eventually she said she would give us a key to get into the mobile and a security pass to enter through the barriers into the site by car. Truth is this could have been offered much more quickly, with grace and courtesy instead of offensive grumbling by two very unhappy people. When we’d had enough of their animated whinging we challenged their appallingly poor customer attitude. They didn’t like it. There came a threat from him to send us away keyless until 3pm. Never had this with any other ‘hotel experience’. So it was put to him directly, which time is it, he stared; he went quiet, she repeated 2pm so then we got the keys and they went off site briskly. We had to return for the wrist security tags to be able to open various heavy metal gates to access the pedestrian part of the site and to access pool areas. If you are weak or disabled you will have great difficulty pushing these gates and surprisingly there’s no disabled hoist at the swimming pools either. As I said we had booked a 4 night stay here with Yelloh, had we booked through Canvas instead we would have met their very pleasant young and incredibly friendly representatives we met on this site. Yelloh don’t seem to have their own staff on the ground here. We also booked a cottage for three nights with Yelloh on a campsite east of Paris/​lle — de — France, and the differences between the two sites is stark. We got to the Paris site a day early too, about 8pm and it wasn’t a crisis instead they joked with me that I drove too fast. No insults and no whinging. While they were pretty full up with many hundreds of guests and this was obvious, they cheerfully made an effort for us (la vallee owners take note and go take a holiday here to see how it should be done.