We booked a one night stay in a family room. The hotel is tired and in need of a complete refurb. The family rooms are furthest away from reception. If you (and only 1 other) have the courage to use the 3 sided lift you will save some muscle wear lugging bags to your room.

The room was dirty and the cleaning staff could benefit from an introduction to the benefits of lime scale remover! Our towels were small and threadbare. The family rooms are positioned directly above the room used for wedding parties (I understand such functions are held most weekends). Owing to the smoking ban, smokers stand outside drinking and celebrating thus giving little or no chance of getting kids to sleep before the function ends (in our case - midnight).

We ate dinner in the restaurant where the service was slow and the food overcooked. They do offer a kids menu which was surprisingly good value and in fact our daughter's meal looked more appealing than ours!

The price charged (£125 B&B in our case) does tend to give slightly higher expectations than the hotel delivers and I would not recommend a stay here unless you have to stay in this area and cannot find ANYWHERE else!

Stayed here for a wedding for two nights. The wedding was great and the evening superb but the hotel....... is very tired looking and in need of a really good refurb. We had booked a Premier room but it really wasn't. View of the garden was very limited and the facilities in the room not what I would call Premier. We effectively paid a London rate but nowhere near the quality of a quality London hotel. To be honest though the options for hotels in the New Forest are somewhat limited so keep looking around.

Although we only stayed one night it was a special occasion as my brother had just arrived from New Zealand. He was over for a 4 day conference and the organisers had booked him into the hotel for the duration of the conference. We picked him up at Heathrow and wanted to have a celebratory dinner with him before departing to work on the following morning.
I am a pilot and stay in many hotels around the World; this is the worst I have seen, for the price charged, for many years.
The entrance to the hotel is very tired, the reception area is dirty and the staff slovenly and slow. The room (no 1 premium) was reasonable with a good view. There was no hot water, only tepid, no reception for the television and the bathroom was desperately in need of refurbishment.
The dinner was thrown in front of us, although the food was reasonable.
This hotel is most certainly very very poor value for money and I would not recommend it to anyone.Avoid at all costs.

We also stayed here in August and it is such a shame about the facilities. The lift is indeed like a large dumb-waiter. And although they are child-friendly the facilities are inadequate to back-up this policy. The family rooms are in the new wing. Our room was on the top floor, along a long corridor and then worse...up about 6 more stairs. It's not ideal with 2 sleeping children under 5, bags and buggy. We had a family room which became cramped once the travel cot was up, all tied up with the smallest bathroom in the world - anyone sitting on the loo would be hit if the door were opened!

However, all is not doom and gloom! The staff were lovely and the food was indeed great. I had phoned around many, many New Forest hotels to find that their definition of 'child-friendly' did not really apply to under 5s. e.g no children in the restaurant or they could eat in there but not until it opened at 7.15 (bedtime for mine), or even no cots.

I would recommend it but with a pre-warning of not to expect it to be completely without hitches.