Das Gerstl Family Retreat - Reschensee (IT)

 3-4 hour drive (can take car train from Klosters) from Zurich. Slow with public transport but possible. Can be done mostly on swiss trains (or the railjet to Innsbruck) and the 273 bus that is in our experience reliable in Süd-Tirol


https://www.dasgerstlfamily.com/


Highlights


  • Excellent food

  • Modern and really great hotel facilities

  • Beautiful hotel inside and out

  • Lake location is stunning 


Less strong for

  • The local area has less to offer in terms of family activities than other mountain areas and you need a car to properly explore

  • Quite a lot of screens in the kids play areas 

  • No lunch included in the price for adults


Food


The food was excellent and you could tell you were in Italy and not Austria. There is a buffet element to the evening meal (e.g. dessert or starters) but normally at least 2 courses are served at the table. 


They had a full pizza oven serving fresh pizza at dinner 5 nights a week as well as an ice cream soft-serve machine for kids. The kids menu was very pasta-oriented but our kids ate well. 


The breakfast buffet was excellent with plenty of choice and great quality. 


Free coffee available all day. 


Kids Club


We didn’t use, so no comment on the quality. 


The club seemed to have set slots e.g. morning 9-11:45, with drop off from 9-10. The club was no parents.


Amenities


The pools are really really nice. There is a large outdoor pool, a baby pool (with small slide) and a water play area, then a separate teen pool with net, a triple slide and then a long flume. Annoyingly you need a keycard to get from one area to the other, but the pools are really fantastic. 


The spa area is also very nice, with two infusions in the afternoon (16:30 and 17:30)


There is a large indoor play area for kids. This had a small football area, climbing and bouldering wall, trampolines and a games wall. This was really good, although we found some of the screens a bit excessive (e.g. on the trampolines). It felt like the tech was there to be “impressive” rather than really serving a purpose. On the trampolines the kids can just jump and talk to each other.


Other Notes


Our room didn’t have a separate kids sleeping area and wasn’t very big - i probably wouldn’t go back to that room category for a longer stay. 

All the sections of the dining room were nice - panorama perhaps had the best view (although a bit further from the buffet)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Märchenhotel Braunwald (CH)

Image
Car-free village - have to take the funicular from Lindthal. They will take you luggage for you and bring to your room, so pretty easy. They send you a pass for all public transport in Glarus so also free.  Food  Good, but not excellent. 3 choices at dinner - generally one meat, fish and vegetarian but one night they did one meat, one veggie and then one vegan, and that was a bit of a flop. Salad buffet was fine, but no real variation. Breakfast buffet was good quality food, but not the most impressive selection. Eggs to order and brought to your table though, which was good.  The dining room is really impressive without any real “bad” tables. All have a view and there’s enough space between tables that it’s not crowded.  After the storytime each evening a train drives the kids into their dining room. This was great - the kids can eat from their buffet at tables in the separate kids room (with supervision from parents) but it meant that our table in the main restaura...
Read more

Hotel Laurentius Fiss (AT)

  Time from Zurich: 3 hour drive or train to Landeck-Zams and 2 buses up the hill. You could probably find a taxi company to drive you up to Fiss.  https://www.familienhotel-laurentius.com/ Food Good to very good. Lunch buffet was not so exciting/often left-overs from the night before but there was continuous food and cakes in the afternoon were nice.  First table they gave us was right in thoroughfare but they moved us to a nice window table on request  Kids buffet starts at 6 Kids Club  Had a really nice big play area indoors for parents and kids, including small soft play, games consoles and lots of ride-on cars.  Separate kids club without parents. Staff seemed very good. Flexible. Not chaotic and ratios seemed good. Lots of activities with the kids (e.g. going out on walks etc.)  Pool & Amenities Indoor and small outdoor pool for families. Fun triple slide. Nice little baby pool with toys. the pool area nice and new and renovated, never felt b...
Read more