The owner of casa Favonio, Sonia, who was remarkebly absent during our stay, seems to have taste for nice things and flair to recruit dedicated, hard working though unskilled and most probably inexpensive staff. To run any business requires spending some money and it is obviously something that the owners have difficulty understanding, particularly in view of the rates that they charge.
the list is long and here below are only few examples of our 6 night stay in Casa Favonio:
it starts by being woken up every morning around 7.30/ 8 am by voices and phones constantly ringing in the reception, which is cleverly located right next to the guest rooms of the ground floor. there is no sound proofing in the house. Followed by the necessity of sleeping with closed windows and air conditionning on (again particularly if you sleep on the ground floor) as the place is infested by insects and rodents which have easy access to all rooms - this could easily be avoided by simply instauring net windows. After being told that nothing could be done about the mice visiting our room (they run out of poison and we should know that we are in the country...), it seems that they were also unable to clean the mice droppings and dead insects that layed on our terrace floor for the all duration of our stay. A difficult job particularly given the size of our terrace (less than 2sqm), our ashtray and glasses were never cleaned either.
Maximising the capacity of the place is the only concern of the owner and we witnessed the tetris rearrangement of the guests ( clients asked to move rooms in order to accomodate new guests) and we all seem to been given different messages about availability of rooms.
The icing on the cake is the utter lack of flexibility and professionalism of the owner who is clearly setting strict rules of management and reservation that only she knows. When we attempted to contact her in order to voice our reasonable concerns as a paying guest, we were told by her manager that she could not be reached because of a lack of reception on her mobile phone and still a week later have had no response to our wish to speak to her. In stark contrast when we needed to speak to her vis a vis pricing we were able to reach her very easily.
The experience left us with the feeling that we just payed for the luxury life style of the owners. Casa Favonio should remain a holiday house where the owner treats their friends rather than pretending to be a stylish expensive bed and breakfast and have guests paying high rates for no or very poor service.
