Ramada Plaza The Royal Berkshire, Ascot

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Quiet location, Beautiful rooms, friendly staff, personal service
Disadvantages:	Food and Drink is expensive compared to room rates

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

For the past 5 or 6 years my family and i have gone away for christmas as a treat. This stops all the age old arguments about washing up and allows us all to spend some real quality time together and relax.

Christmas 2006 - location is the Royal Berkshire Ramada Hotel in Ascot. We'd never really considered a hotel in this area before - had always assumed it would be too expensive but this actually worked out cheaper than the previous year on room rate with us paying £250pp for 3 nights DBB. The only extra expense being drinks which seemed quite expensive.

The hotel looks like a old country mansion with quite extensive grounds which are great for a walk after too big a christmas lunch!

The rooms are of a very high standard - I made sure I had a nose around everyone's room(!). They all had plenty of space to relax in for some peace and quiet. Specifically they all had little lounge areas with sofas or big arm chairs for that after lunch snooze! Our bathroom was also fantastic - almost the same size as our main room with lots of fluffy white towels and good quality toiletries.

As a large group of 12, for our meals the hotel organised for us to all sit in a separate room around 1 large table which was special. We had the same two waitresses for our entire stay which made the service extra personal. The atmosphere was very relaxed and despite the staff obviously having to stick to quite a rigid timetable there was no pressure on us to conform with it.

The hotel also organised some extra activities such as a Treasure hunt, a "Guess the weight of the cake" competition and a quiz. We have been to hotels in the past where they organise alot more such as panto visits, karaoke, carol singing etc but this hotel did have a much quieter feel.

There was quite an emphasis on keeping all adult parties separate from the parties with small children which seemed to come as a welcome surprise to alot of the guests.

Other facilities include a leisure centre and also a beauty room of which we took advantage of. The beauty room manager organise for myself, my sister and my mum to have the room to ourselves for a morning so we were able to have multiple treatments together. She also organised champagne and orange juice for us as a special treat so we felt especially relaxed for our break!

The only thing that I could find fault with was that for teh number of guests in the hotel at Christmas, there just wasn't enough space in the lounges to accomodate everyone to spend time together in groups. Obviously though there is not much that the hotel can do if they do not have the rooms available, but this should probably be taken into account when booking for large parties.

A great friendly hotel with a welcoming and festive atmosphere.