Hey! I wonder if I saw you there :)

Does this hotel shut down during October and November?

The whole of October and all of November except 4 days is blanked out even for paid stays!

Do they shut down, I can't believe they are fully booked, if you look at December onwards any date is available.

no, because i cancelled my booking - we are going this weekend .. :D (saturday public holiday in swiss = Bundesfeiertag)

yes, end of September they shut down....

How is the lounge at IC Davos? Also food included in evening?

I was there in early Jan 2015 and found the "lounge offering" sorely lacking. A few 3-5 small nibbles / items with scarce staff around to replenish even cups and glasses let alone the bits of food. I got it for free as part of an upgrade, but would not pay for it. YMMV

Unfortunately they closed the lounge and will not open it again...

Stayed there at the end of this summer and was told they want to establish something with a lot of "Lifestyle" in the Lounge rooms. They would or could not tell us what it will be...

They offered breakfast in the restaurant, a piece of cake and drinks in the bar in the afternoon. For the evening they reserved a very small room at the end of their Studio Grigio restaurant. Only three small tables and place for about 8 (!) people.
A few standard drinks (soft drinks, beer and wine plus Prosecco) and about 10 pieces of small appetizers. They were not refilled for hours and on Saturday no one was attending / serving the lounge. Waited over an hour for a beer and had to ask twice before it finally arrived. Service got better the next evening - the food not. Got some kind of food poisoning (probably as the appetizers had some kind of half raw duck breast on it that had not been chilled) and started vomiting in the night...

Booking Club or paying extra for the "lounge" is definitely not worth it - unless you travel with kids which at least is great for the free drinks (which are very, very expensive in the hotel).

the lounge is open since 23 of december. we stayed at this property for 3 nights, the lounge is okay but not a big deal. i would prefer to eat at the italian restaurant, much better and cheap for switzerland. ^

That is really interesting, as they told us in summer that they have closed it and would also not reopen it for the winter season... Maybe they had other people complaining, too?
How about the offerings?
And since when do they have an Italian restaurant?

Got a reply from the hotel:

but this means that no breakfast is included??

Ask, as long as you can take the breakfast in the restaurant you are fine. Much better then what I saw in the lounge about a year back. Seems they skip lounge breakfast as the effort is not worth it and can't replicate the restaurant.

Given the usually prominent Russian tourists are struggling with a weak Ruble and the Swiss Franc appreciated a lot, the place may not be that crowded (outside of the World Economic Forum) and you can actually get a seat and have breakfast in a peaceful atmosphere without people carrying on their conversations between tables half across the restaurant. Food offering was pretty good.

As a RA is it worth buying a club room here?

The rate difference over a regular room isn't that great and the room categories above club look relatively expensive and thus good value as an upgrade

As an RA you will most likely be upgraded to the Executive Suite with Club Access.

The normal upgrade seems to be to a junior suite which is only 1 cat above the club room but the normal base for upgrades is the cheapest room. So I am more interested in getting an upgrade to a proper suite than paying the cheapest possible rate.

they will grant RA's at least a two level upgrade. I had over NYE booked a Club and received the Alpine Suite. In all my stays except one, I received when booking the entry level room the Alpine King (aka junior suite) including club privileges. During this exception I have to say that the hotel was fully booked as well.

Do all guests/ RAs get free ski passes here
I came across this site that lists the IC giving out free lift passes - http://www.davos.ch/en/winter/activi...pass-for-free/

Also is booking on points here limit the benefits over a revenue booking? I noticed on award bookings you can get the Deluxe room (1 cat above superior)

Thanks!

All benefits on award stays.

Nice offer for ski passes... However, during Nov/Dec of the last few ski seasons, taking hiking poles was a better choice than taking skis. I wouldn't book a ski holiday in Nov/Dec/early Jan in the Alps anymore.

Simply book an overnight stay in one of the accommodations listed below, in our holiday shop Davos Klosters or at our guest services, for every night you book, you'll receive a ski pass for the open Davos Klosters Mountains ski areas.

If you book via their guest services (or their "holiday shop") only it seems. And somehow something tells me the rates there will be higher :D And Nov/Early December usually isn't great for skiing..

Given rates here are pretty low it doesn't strike me as the best use of points.

depends really on the time. in winter season the rates seems to be regularly above 250 chf. stayed over nye and then it was definitely an excellent use of points.

but agree, especially during summer season, cash is always the preferred option

Agree, it depends on the days you will stay. I was there last year in Jan (2015) about 2 weeks prior to World Economic Forum and originally they had wanted around 700 CHF for a Deluxe room (before the Swiss Franc appreciated a good 25% or so). Hence I had booked all on points, but then the IHG Winter Sale came to the rescue and I got a Deluxe with breakfast for 210 CHF and saved the points. YMMV

I have a Deluxe King booked for an upcoming trip. Is it worth paying for versus getting the Superior King for roughly $48 a night cheaper? Any idea what to expect for a possible upgraded as a Spire Ambassador? Thanks!

I just tried to make a 14 day reservation here for my son and his school friend.friend is over 18 (just) and son will be just short.I wanted to use a combination of Barclays free night,my points and my wife's points as I did not have enough.I called the ambassador service centre to try to get everything together,and the agent said there was no availability for reward nights,and I must make a paid stay.I love my son,but he's not getting 560 Swiss francs a night from me,for 14 nights.

I advised the customer service agent that rooms were showing on the website for 50k points per night,but she insisted it was paid only.She tried a system refresh and then still insisted paid on,no reward nights.

So I then made 3 different reservations,1 using Barclays free night,1 using my wife's points and 1 mine on the website.The customer service agent could see the reservations as I made them,I was still on the telephone at the time.She could not explain why I was able to make a reservation when no reward rooms were available,but I had no problems on line.

I am now slightly concerned as to whether these reservations will get cancelled by the hotel as an error.Anybody have any thoughts on this?

I have just completed a stay here and found it a real mixed bag.

Initial impressions were very good, the architecture is stunning and the interior fit out of high quality. Given the location though the 30 CHF per day parking fee seems rather stingy.

I paid for a club room and was upgraded to a very large Alpine Suite which was very nice but somewhat oddly laid out with a huge balcony and relatively narrow bedroom and living room at key points as it forms the end corner of the property.

We were there to relax and ski and the property works well for that in theory, in practice however less so. The room temperature was consistently too high (extraordinarily so in the bedroom), whilst I should have complained about this the entire property was insanely hot and I heard many other guests remarking how unpleasant this was. service in the restaurants and the bars was painfully slow meaning a dinner took 2 to 3 hours. There simply is not enough staff. A turndown service materialised only for one day of the 3 we spent at the property.

The club lounge is an excellent space but poorly stocked, breakfast is served in the main capricorn restaurant for club guests which in practice means you get the same terrible service as everyone else. The lounge serves afternoon tea (we never tried it) and 2 hours of evening drinks and canapes (5 low end spirits, one red, one white and a prosecco wine and carlsberg by the bottle). The now obvious theme of poor staff to guest ration was very obvious in the lounge, no-one ever check if you were entitled to lounge access or not and the door was left open and unattended.

The basic breakfast offer includes proseecco and decent hot and cold options but don't expect to be shown to a table, be asked if you want a hot drink or to receive your hot drink within 20 minutes of asking. This is a consistent theme, the service is just terrible and for us ultimately destroyed the entire experience. Not only at breakfast but in the 2 restaurants we tried too (capricorn a la carte - 2.5 hours for dinner service and studio grigio at 3 hours, the latter we didn't even get served the complete tasting menus we had chosen and were charged for because the service was so slow and took 3 hours to complete what we did have).

At the bar (nuts & co) we waited almost 20 minutes for someone to offer to serve us and then some time for drinks to arrive. Food and drink quality here is very high but the shockingly bad service detracts from that too much to make an enjoyable experience.

On our final night we attempted to try Alpina the italian restaurant (we made our reservations for all 3 nights on the first day). when we arrived we were offered only what I would describe as the worst table in the restaurant. I would not have taken that table had I been given a reservation for the one time reopening of el-bulli. It was close to the main entrance and by a buffet station. We left and were told we could wait for a further unspecified time which was later adjusted to approximately 15 mins (it was 20:45 by this point). My wife sensibly didn't want to waste more time and we returned to the room and ordered a delivery pizza 9which was very nice) instead, so at least that kept my overall bill down.

To round things off I didn't even get a full final folio (which I didn't notice until I left) just a credit card receipt. This type of lack of attention really summed up our experience at the property and I expect an awful lot more for 2K CHF (and that was using a BOGO voucher too) than this property delivered.

There are so many nice touches, some truly excellent staff (including one who repaired my glasses with superglue when I broke them on the slopes) but a remote property such as this really needs to lift it's game in terms of service at in house restaurants. It all frankly felt as if a hugely impressive and very expensive space was being run on a skeleton staff by fairly poorly trained people.

Will I be back? Despite loving the potential of the place and the slopes of Davos Klosters, sadly almost certainly not. There are far too many issues for a new property like this. Ultimately the GM needs to take responsibility for this.

Wow, I just checked out yesterday after a 5 night stay and my experiences are so different to yours that it seems like we were staying at different properties.

I will do a full trip report over the next couple of days if I get time, but I had virtually no service issues whatsoever; from contact with staff prior to arrival, to our welcome, status recognition and upgrade through to breakfast, club and dinner and general service throughout the hotel, everything was superb.

It was very busy on Friday and Saturday nights, and the subsequent breakfasts (the manager confirmed to me that the hotel was full in a long conversation that I had with him on Friday) but my wait for a table on the busiest breakfast (Sunday morning) was 5 minutes. Neither my wife nor I had the problems you had getting coffee when needed and it always came within a few minutes of being ordered. The food offerings for breakfast were very good too. We ate at Al Pino on Friday evening at 8.30PM and had no service issues or delays. Nice drinks on the sun terrace of Nuts and co throughout our stay, again with no delays. (Even on the really sunny and busy apres-ski times).

And we had turn-down every evening too and no problems with the heating controls, although we did turn down the temperature each day and the system responded fast.

If I was trying to be picky then I would say the shuttle service could be a little better organised, along with the concierge being a bit more helpful, generally. But that really is trying to be picky as Marcus (guest relations manager) who was covering for the usual concierge one day was absolutely superb and so helpful with booking an out-of-hotel special request and making all the necessary arrangements for us. Oh, and the Club Lounge was always unattended at the entrance you say, but it didn't seem to me that anyone was abusing their rights-or-not to access; on the busiest evening there must have been 12 people plus us in there, on a usual evening maybe 4-6 - plus a lovely little dog! :-)

Our stay was so superb that we are already looking forward to booking our next visit to Davos.

It wasn't just me, in our restaurant experiences everyone around us had painfully slow service.

In our 3 days stay, we were never shown to a table for breakfast once were you? Never proactively asked if we wanted a hot drink (no self serve options available), once flagged down passing staff and waited for ages each time.

In the club lounge again we were there at the same time, plates and glasses were not cleared away, it was fairly busy on Saturday and Sunday which meant sitting at tables with uncleared crockery and glassware from previous occupants, these sat for a long time before being cleared away, indeed the guy attending to the lounge cleared more recently finished items from other guests a good half hour before clearing the previous occupants detritus from our table. The offering in the lounge was also really basic (despite the great facilities), I have had better club lounges product offerings at CP's. This is certainly the worst food and beverage offering of any IC I have ever visited (with a club lounge). I absolutely would not pay again for club. We saw the dog each day too, I am not sure I am keen on having pets running around the lounge either.

Did you eat at Studio Grigio or Capricorn (a la carte)? Again service standards were awful, with the exception of the bar in Studio Grigio which was quite good perhaps because it was bar service not table service.

When went to Nuts & Co for a pre dinner drink on Saturday a party of 6 absorbed the entire attention of the 2 staff in there for almost half an hour before we managed to get served (after sourcing our own menus from the bar).

I accept that the front of house staff were pretty good but elsewhere they really were not, I cannot comment about service standards in Al Pino since we left quite promptly given the table offered.

I don't think I am being over picky, my experience spanned Friday to Monday and encompassed every facility and service offered. I can only assume you ate and drank more out of the hotel as I now wish I had.

If you see the hotel as a place to stay and base yourself whilst you ski and eat and drink out (or self provision as we did with gin) then I can see that the impact would it be high. If you expect a much more resort like experience in a country renowned for it's hotel service standards I feel you will be bitterly disappointed as indeed we were.

The standard service for breakfast is for guests to find a free table after giving their room number to the member of staff at the podium, it isn't usual to be shown to a table. However on the busiest morning when a small queue had formed because there were no free tables (about 6 people plus us) we were shown to a table for 2 in the spill-over room (actually Al Pino) that had been set up to accommodate the extra numbers. We got asked by our servers about coffee on most mornings, but I think the first couple of busy days I had to flag someone down, which again was no problem. I have to say I found the service at breakfast very good, even to the point that at 10.20 a member of staff went round the restaurant to tell everyone that the food was finishing in 10 minutes. One morning a server came around at 10.35 with a selection of pastries etc asking if we would like anything before they were taken away.

I agree that used plates and glasses weren't cleared away quickly in the Club Lounge, but it didn't really pose us a problem as there were plenty of free tables even at the busiest times. Some of the food offerings in the evening I actually found quite good; I thought offering soup with bread was a very nice touch and more than you get in some lounges. There were always 3 different types of canapes that were replenished regularly. I know we have different ideas regarding Lounge value, but given that it gave us a full and comprehensive breakfast in Capricorn and drinks and snacks in the evening I found it represented good value to us. The little dog didn't bother us, he was very cute, but I get your point.

We ate at Al Pino on Friday evening, had room service on 2 nights, had a snack in Studio Grigio one evening. Didn't try Capricorn outside of breakfast. We only ate out once as we found breakfast and the evening snacks kept us going quite nicely. Funnily enough I quite like that Mongolian vodka in the club (it's actually a premium brand, I've had it in Switzerland before) - very filtered and very smooth. :-)

It is strange how our experiences are so different, I can only imagine you had really bad luck when I compare our own experiences over the same period. But we certainly spent a lot of time at the hotel, over a longer period than yourselves, and thoroughly enjoyed fairly much all aspects of it. And I haven't even talked about our lovely room and the view either yet... Trip report to follow...

Agree the suite and the view was good barring the high temperatures that plagued the entire property but the services we consumed at the hotel were not of the standard I think are reasonable to expect at the prices being levied. The annoying thing was that they could have been good as the quality of the food and drink was high, just that the service was so bad it detracted from the parts that worked.

The root cause of the service issues seemed to me to be too few staff trying to serve too many customers. They didn't want to give bad service they just did because they were too stretched todo anything better. A smile case in point being serving of our bottle of wine in Capricorn. We had to request every top up and ended up with full glasses as we finished our meal, this would have been fine had the wine bucket been closer so that I could self serve but it was located 40 feet from our table. This is a relatively minor point but illustrative.

At breakfast on our first day it wasn't immediately clear which tables were in use so we sat at a table which wasn't being used for some 10 minutes before realising we needed to sit somewhere else when no cutlery or service of any kind was forthcoming. Not once on any of the 3 days did any staff member proactively ask if we wanted any drinks etc. at breakfast in the 10 to 20 minutes it had taken to be seated, get juices, have some cereal etc. On the Sunday it was so hard to find any staff at all that I had to go to the single staff member manning the arrival station to demand a hot drink after 20 plus minutes waiting.

I wonder if timing was a factor, we were at breakfast quite early and service was particularly bad. We tend to eat quite late (dinner reservations around 20:30 each night) and service was particularly bad, perhaps late breakfast early dinner was better?

The repeated nature of our experience in each and every restaurant makes me think we were not unlucky with uniquely slow staff, it was a universal problem. Now if we were in the med where it mightn't be too uncommon to take 3 plus hours to execute a meal service and we were relaxed about that, it might be fine, but in Northern Europe it really isn't. It would have been far worse had I been trying to conduct business rather than relaxing.

I think the overall context sets the scene for everything else, in overall context even my massively laid back wife was unhappy about service standards and it needs to be pretty bad before she starts to moan. That ruined the experience for us. I so wanted to like this property. If you feel your overall xoerience is good it tends to smooth the rough edges, when you think it is bad it tends to sharpen them.

To add insult to injury my 2k CHF of spend has just posted as a non-qualifying stay. This property is a joke.

i actually stay around 50 - 60 nights per year at mostly different IC hotels around the world - Davos is one of my favorite, top 3 Hotels. The service is really good, the property mind-blowing and Davos itself amazing for hiking and skiing.

Staying there around 4-5 times per year .... much better than Berchtesgaden ever was..

by the way: we were there last weekend as well ... i am sure we saw you in the lounge - anyway we had delicious swiss raclette at Capricorn Saturday evening

regarding Breakfast on Sunday, yes - i never saw the area busy like that - please note the hotel was fully booked - just 1 room left. For me, i understand that the employees were really busy - if i am busy in my job i appreciate clients who accept and realize the situation...

I think if I had booked a bottom end room on cash or points and received a junior suite, RA benefits, club access etc. and had little interaction with the food and beverage outlets beyond breakfast when I was in no rush to go and hit the slopes then I mght be perfectly happy.

However I didn't book a cheap room and I did attempt to spend a fair amount in the F&B outlets in the evenings. Service wasn't bad then because it was busy as none of the places we spent time in were even close to busy (not even half full) except the lounge, when we spent time in them, it was just bad service or not enough staff to deliver good service.

We felt the temperature was perfect throughout the hotel, and the room controls worked well to our tastes; we prefer to sleep at 19 or 20 degrees and the controls got us there quickly with no undue rattling air conditioning or heating fan noise etc. Genuinely can't see how you thought the hotel was too hot....might you have been dressed in layers because of the location/skiing?

We asked how it worked on our first visit, so didn't have the problem of sitting at the wrong table to start with. We got to know our regular servers quite well over the 5 breakfasts, including the 2 busy ones, so I just don't understand how you could have not seen anyone to serve you at all. I can only imagine that each day you sat at an unfortunately positioned table that didn't get the regular walk-by of staff that we got every day.

We are also late evening diners too so it's not that; we ate at 8.30PM in Al Pino and had no problems, and room service and Studio Grigio were about that time too. Our room service one night took about 35 minutes, but hey...it was busy! But we do go down to breakfast late, and that is normally the busiest time for breakfasts at the weekend, as it was last weekend. It was seriously ramped-up on Sunday morning breakfast, to the point that not only Capricorn was full but so was Al Pino in the spill over room. But my wife and I both thought the staff and hotel handled it admirably. I've experienced many hotel breakfasts break down at far fewer numbers.

This. I think sometimes when things start off badly they can snowball to much worse before you know it, so your take on the overall context is completely different to mine for the same hotel and period. It's a real shame for you, as for me it's an absolute stand-out skiing holiday stay. Probably in the top-5 of all time for my wife and me, when I think of all aspects.

We had no choice about where to sit there wasn't a lot of space to choose from so ended up in the area parallel to the cold buffet/fruit area each day. There was never any sort of proactive breakfast service, no one at any point asked what we wanted and I think I would still be in there today waiting to be served If I hadn't flagged down staff myself who evidently did not want me to bother them from their general demeanour.

We couldn't wear layers indoors it was so hot, I couldn't even put on my ski jackets when indoors it was so hot. Never once wore more than a shirt indoors and still found it too hot and heard others in the lounge complaining about exactly the same thing. I prefer to sleep at 17 to 18 degrees and could not get our bedroom temperature anywhere close to this. Oddly though the temperature in our lounge was fine.

Some may see this as a positive but even in ski resorts I have never had a hotel with public areas and rooms so uncomfortably hot. The only respite was to stand outside.

I have emailed the GM about our overall experiences but have little confidence that I will get a response which changes my opinion of the property.

I have had issues with my regular ski resort properties, The Westin Whistler and Westin Mammoth Monache but they pale into insignificance compared to our issues at Davos.

So you weren't the group with the little dog then? We must have seen you in there. It seems we were all in the club room over the weekend! :-)

Did you end up in the Al Pino spill-over room on Sunday breakfast? We initially were going to decline the table we were shown to in there and wait for a table in Capricorn, but actually it was very well laid out in Al Pino and the staff seem to be coping well so we stayed there.

It truly is a wonderful hotel isn't it! And I never realised how lovely Davos was.

I didn't notice anyone having any of these problems, but because we didn't experience any of them ourselves maybe we weren't looking for them.

Out of curiosity do those who thought service was good at the IC Davos speak German?

Nein! Danke-schon. And that's about it! :-)

Lol even I can manage zwei bier bitte ;)

yes :D

Land-of-Miles - don't despair ;). I can fully echo your observations (aside from the hotel / rooms being too hot). Admittedly, I was there in Jan 2015 for 5 nights and your observations about the breakfast chaos (pick your own table when most are still full of dishes and items - so free or not?) and the painfully slow service in the restaurants, a messy not looked after "lounge" and a general aura of disorganization. Concierge service was great for me (must have been the tips that greased the wheels :)) and after the first poor in-house restaurant experience we ate outside every lunch and dinner (e.g. Restaurant Kulm was fantastic, we went 3 times).

I also dealt with Markus T. (Guest Services Manager) after I shared my observations and experiences post stay (he was on leave when I was there) and he is great and fixed a lot of things and provided a good amount of IHG points to make up for it (without me asking). Well recovered.

I would still return as I like the hotel and do agree that most issues are (under) staffing related, but these days Switzerland is a bit rich in cost and I will rather go to Austria. YMMV.

I speak (am) German and I thought it wasn't good. There you go. :D