Green Man - Fownhope

Having worked as a loader and attended this great venue in the past with my client I decided to treat my girlfriend with a mid Xmas new year break. I took advantage of one of the great deals as it is a quiet period. On arrival to book in we waited 20 minutes to be attended to. No matter how much knocking on the staff door brought any attention. I was told we had the bridal suite. If I had paid full price on my wedding night for the room I would have been disappointed. The room looked unclean. The sofas were grubby and tired. The furniture did not match and looked like it was a conglomerate of several rooms with a tired paint job. To pick up on a previous review contacting the venue by phone to book an evening meal is impossible and is online only. 6.15pm was the latest time I could get into the restaurant so you'd think it was busy. The restaurant was empty most of the evening. However the staff that were were available were attentive. Clearly there has been a change in ownership and the family touch has been lost. To be fair, on the upside the food was excellent and £32 for a rib eye was good. The breakfast has taken a cost cutting hit in presentation and value however was tasty and adequate even with one poached egg and seating is in the bar now I hope the overall wow factor has not been lost and can be retained with a little attention to detail.

Regrettably, not one of our most successful anniversary evenings out. The hotel and pub itself is well appointed and our bedroom when we arrived was warm and clean. We arranged to have dinner at 7 o’clock and the menu was good and we chose to have two venison pies. Although very attractively presented the contents of the pies were virtually null. Not much Bambi in these. these. We enjoyed sitting in the bar and then retired to bed. No sooner had we got into bed but we were joined by a tribute band devoted to Tina Turner. We love Tina Turner but we didn’t actually want to have her in the room with us. Nobody had warned us that there was live music on and it was such a volume that it prevented a sleeping for a couple of hours. Given that it was such a very cold night -5, we woke at about 3 o’clock to find that the heating wasn’t working. We found that there was a bar fire in the cupboard and so we put that on and that helped a little. The bathroom, although quite modern and clean only featured a shower directly from above without any other kind of shower attachment. Unfortunately, the water that emerged from the shower was lukewarm, the toilet again had woken us in the night because it was continually refilling and one of the buttons that flushes the toilet was obviously broken and hadn’t been repaired. Breakfast next day put us directly next to somebody who we didn’t know there was no spacing allowed, and we asked to be moved into one of the other table areas. This was done, you could tell with a bit of reluctance. When our breakfast which we had booked the night before arrived, they were warmish but was obviously not freshly cooked and when I asked one of the front of house staff for some brown sauce for my breakfast, I was just pointed in the direction of another room to go and find it. It’s a very simple thing, try and delight your customers. If you just stepped through and brought it to me that would’ve been nice that would’ve saved the morning. I don’t like moaning about other businesses. Hospitality is a hard enough thing to do, but there are so many ways of making it better without any extra cost. Unfortunately we won’t be returning to the green man.

Room: What a lovely place to stay, close to Hereford with just a 20 minute drive situated in a really quiet quaint village. I would loved to have given 4 stars however the room although clean could have done with a real deep clean, there were some cobwebs and the shower was going over in terms of spotlessly clean, bed was comfy enough however the room was hot so I used the fan provided which did generate quite some circulation in the small space. The carpet could do with some repair and the noisy floorboards were something else, which you can anticipate in an old building but maybe they could be looked at? Despite this I would stay again, the stay were really attentive and nothing would have been too much trouble.

We had issue after issue when we stayed at The Greenman. In chronological order: A week or two before arriving, I tried contacting them by telephone to add dinner to our booking. I got through to an answering service. Over the following days, I tried several times each day, all with the same result. I left voice messages, but received no response. In total, I tried to reach them by phone 15-20 times, all with no result. By then it was already pretty clear that something was seriously amiss there. We were on a walking holiday, and on the afternoon of our arrival I was sweaty and much in need of a shower. However, there was no hot water! Staff put the water heater on boost, and in the event I had to wait about 20 minutes to take my shower. In the meantime, I thought I’d make use of the time by having a shave. However, the sink plug was ineffective and the sink retained no water. When I was eventually able to take my shower, the water backed up in the shower tray to the point that it started to leak over the floor, this due to a partially blocked drain. Having taken my shower and dressed, I needed to catch up with my emails. However, there was no wifi signal in our room (Room 14). Or, to the extent that there may have been, the wifi was so slow as to be completely unusable. Dinner that evening was mercifully good. However, on returning to our room, we were shocked by loud stomping noises coming from the room above. In fact, the guests in that room were using it properly - the noise was due to the fact that their floor / our ceiling is so lightweight and flimsy that every noise and footstep could be heard at full volume. We delayed going to bed until the guests upstairs had themselves gone to bed. There would have been no point in turning in earlier - it would’ve been impossible to sleep. Upon eventually going to bed and turning out the lights, we realised that the room was lit by a low green light. The reason? There’s a permanently-on illuminated fire escape sign on the bedroom side of the door! We finally managed to get to sleep against all the odds. However, it was a broken night’s sleep because we were overheating all night thanks to there being a winter weight duvet on the bed - totally inappropriate for the season we were in. For security reasons, we were also unable to have the window open overnight - we were in a ground floor room, yet anyone could have entered the room via the window. We were only staying the one night, and left the next morning to continue our walking holiday. Prior to checking out, we went to the reception to collect the packed lunch that we’d ordered the previous evening. We were told that the kitchen had no record of a packed lunch having been ordered - this despite the fact that the person with whom we’d placed our order the previous evening had made a point of writing a note for the kitchen whilst we were standing beside him. Being that we were continuing our walk on a Sunday morning and nowhere else was open, we had to do without lunch. Bottom line - the staff were friendly and pleasant, and the dinner was good. Every other aspect of our stay was a shocker. On checking out, I told the person on the desk that I’d be lodging this complaint. He kindly deducted the cost of our dinner from the bill. However, I’d much rather have had a convenient stay and a decent night’s sleep.

Having worked as a loader and attended this great venue in the past with my client I decided to treat my girlfriend with a mid Xmas new year break. I took advantage of one of the great deals as it is a quiet period. On arrival to book in we waited 20 minutes to be attended to. No matter how much knocking on the staff door brought any attention. I was told we had the bridal suite. If I had paid full price on my wedding night for the room I would have been disappointed. The room looked unclean. The sofas were grubby and tired. The furniture did not match and looked like it was a conglomerate of several rooms with a tired paint job. To pick up on a previous review contacting the venue by phone to book an evening meal is impossible and is online only. 6.15pm was the latest time I could get into the restaurant so you'd think it was busy. The restaurant was empty most of the evening. However the staff that were were available were attentive. Clearly there has been a change in ownership and the family touch has been lost. To be fair, on the upside the food was excellent and £32 for a rib eye was good. The breakfast has taken a cost cutting hit in presentation and value however was tasty and adequate even with one poached egg and seating is in the bar now I hope the overall wow factor has not been lost and can be retained with a little attention to detail.