Alpenhotel Weiherbach

Families beware!

I cannot stress enough how dissatisfied I was with the customer service from this hotel, as well as the overall booking process (we booked through Booking.com - never again!!) Bottom line: if you’re a family with children, either book them all as adults or be prepared for hidden fees that borders closely on fraud, but regardless, don’t expect anything other than sub-human customer service.

The root issue is this hotel has the ridiculous policy of charging all occupants, regardless of age, as adult guests. So, if booked through Booking.com, you may very well search for and reserve a room at this hotel for 2 adults and 2 children, but the reservation will only capture 2 adults since the hotel doesn’t accept child reservations. To add the children will run you several hundred extra dollars.

In our case, we booked a room for 2 adults and 2 children, one of our kids is 2 years old and the other was 2 weeks old. The price stated for this reservation, even on the confirmation page, was 600 euro. However, once we confirmed the reservation it only showed 2 adults. We messaged the hotel and politely explained the situation, that there was an error somewhere between them and Booking.com and that our kids were somehow dropped from the reservation (we didn’t understand their absurd policy yet). They messaged back that it would cost an additional 400 euro for us to bring our kids, and to make matters worse, since it was booked through Booking.com it was non-refundable. Ultimately they gave us three choices: we could either pay 1000 euro (for the room that was advertised as 600 euro) and bring our kids, we could abandon our kids somewhere and just go as two adults, or we could cancel the reservation and still be charged 600 euro. What a complete scam!

To make matters worse, the customer service with the hotel was completely unacceptable and awful. Their replies to my wife’s very professional and courteous inquiries were abrasive and rude, at one point sending her a message that said “What is wrong with you”! I figured there must be a miscommunication or something wasn’t translating well between our English and theirs, so I decided to call instead. Boy was that a mistake. The man that I talked to was so outright combative that I couldn’t believe it. Every time I tried explaining what was wrong or asking how we could move forward he would interrupt me, yelling at me, saying various versions of “THIS ISN’T THE HOTELS FAULT THIS IS YOUR FAUL OR BOOKING’s FAULT. NOT THE HOTEL!! THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO” and ultimately, after a short call, he hung up on me mid-sentence. I called back, but he blocked my phone number!!!

So we started working with Booking.com and EVENTUALLY, after over 3 hours on the phone with them across two days and multiple calls, they agreed to pay the difference in price between what we booked and what we were charged, so long as we actually went to the hotel and continued with the stay. We mentioned that we didn’t really feel safe going there with how combative the customer service experience was, but Booking.com told us that didn’t matter. So we went. To be fair, the room was actually decent and the location was great.

When we checked out, they said they’d email us the invoice. We never got an email. We sent them two emails, one a message through Booking.com and the other a normal email. No response. So now we’re working with Booking.com again to have them uphold their end of the deal but they won’t refund us the extra, as promised without an invoice. And the hotel won’t answer our emails, or our phone calls. Get this - my phone number is still blocked from that one short conversation I had a couple weeks ago!! When I call it doesn’t even ring, it just says that the customer wishes not to receive calls from this number 😂 Totally unreal.

In conclusion, this hotel has decent accommodations but their customer service and hotel policies are the absolute worst I have ever encountered - and I’ve worked with a ton of god-awful people in my life.

Beautiful setting, clean room, lovely breakfast. Less accommodating to families with young children. We booked a room for two people, as we were traveling with our newborn who needed no additional accommodations. We were disappointed that they charged us 30 additional euros for simply having our newborn baby in the room with us. They could not provide a baby bed, he ate no breakfast, and we were there less than 18 hours, so not even water was used to bathe him. Understandably, they claimed they want to avoid families packing many people into a double room. However, most guest houses acknowledge that children under two are free, and one would think a newborn baby would be an obvious exception to this policy.

We were traveling far to get to Berchtesgaden, so when we arrived Alpenhotel Weiherbach was almost 8 pm. We tried to ring the owner, but it wasn't available. BUT we did see the owner ( the old lady) inside the house at that moment, so we knock the window to notify her we were here. Surprisingly she refused to let us check-in, and pull down the window cage immediately...
Sadly we had to take all of our luggage walking on the out of no where foreign country to find a hotel at late night. It was the worst hotel experience i ever had , I had never seen this rude service in my life.
I hope no one will have to suffer this kind of experience as we did.

Good