Yarra Valley Lodge

Yarra Valley Lodge is a hipster hotel in Melbourne. This place has 439 reviews and an average rating of 4.3 of 5. This is a very good rating.

10+
images

Reviews from visitors:

Lovely environment, comfortable, clean, very friendly and helpful staff. Food is good, perhaps not excellent. Chicken for lunch, dinner and lunch again (with other options third time around). I'll definitely be back.

Beautiful lodge. Came here for a work event. The catering was awful. Who has a turmeric cold cauliflower salad as a lunch option with the largest “banh mi” rolls known to man but with a 80% bread to filling ratio (full of Mayo, too!) just so wrong. Coffees were ok... catering and huge audio issues we had in our room let down the experience. The grounds look beautiful, I’ll give them that.

Well, if you wany to get some sleep, don't come here. We booked a room for one night just to be be able to sleep in for once and have some "us" time away from our 2-year-old. We went to sleep at 10pm just to be waken up by pop music coming from the hallways at 11pm and another family right next to us slamming doors every 2 minutes and walking up and down the hallway. I mean, this place has hundreds of rooms in two wings and on multiple levels - how hard it is to try and place families with young kids away from other guests? From the amount of cars it was obvious that the hotel was running maybe at around 20% capacity, there was plenty of room to separate us from a potentially loud family. The pop music was coming from the built-in speakers of the hotel...No comment. But this is not the end of our story. After they offered to switch rooms, we finally went to sleep around 1am just to be waken up at 8am by staff trimming the hedge right underneath our room. I mean - can it not be a bit later?? Upon arrival, a family just walked past our ground level garden-view room with open doors while I was trying to rest on the bed. Lucky I was dressed up properly! There were multiple other small issues from the moment of booking until check-out. Their booking system was showing that the dates we wanted was booked out while there were plenty of rooms available, so everything had to be done over the phone to resolve this. The spa was shut down for renovations. The online check-in webpage didn't work (didn't accept either my saved card or any other card, the receptionist admitted that it wasn't me being clumsy).We arrived and thought we would have champagne in the room. The minibar was empty due to COVID, which is fine, but there also wasn't any room service menu in the room. Called up room service and waited 2 minutes while they looked up what kid of champagne they have. We were double-charged for everything on our credit card and now waiting for some of the place holder payments being released - this is after complaints and the receptionist not understanding how the system charged us that much. There were multiple other smaller issues that are not worth to mention on their own, like no lactose free milk available at breakfast, but I think I will stop here. There was literally not one thing that went well with this hotel. Sorry, maybe one thing: the beds are very comfortable, so the 6 hours of sleep I got, I spent comfortably. It's just not possible to have this many coincidences at once - the hotel is under poor management. UPDATE: I read previous reviews from other guest after I posted thr above. The issues with the booking system and the double charging was already an issue for other guests A YEAR AGO. As well as complaints regarding 8am hedge cutting and noise. As well as almost all other issues I mentioned. So one year was not enough for the management to address these issues. Well now I am terrified that I will have to chase the hotel to get the extra charges back. Google reviews are there for a reason - I have my take away message.

The good: the bed was amaizng. Soft and firm at the same time. Extremely comfy and very easy to spend the whole weekend in it and still would be a great weekend away. The entertainment system was quite decent with straming services and casting available. Plenty of parking underground. The bad: the pampas suite was very poorly arranged. They don't take advantage of the views. The carpets are very old and heavily scuffed. The furniture is not stylish and not functional at all. The bathroom was pretty bad. Small shower cubicle with decent water pressure. Spa in the room, but didnt use it. The ugly: the restaurant service was very poor. It literally took 1hr 15mins from entre to main, and it wasn't even that busy. The main (duck) was not well seasoned but cooked well. We had the beef tartare and that was quite nice. Thr breakfast options are very limited but the food was good. Summary: pretty ordinary place to stay. I'm not sure if its worth the price.