“Property overall very nice and spacious with a superb view of the castle.”
But 2 broken toilet seats and a squeaky en-suite door on arrival, took 5 days to repair, despite promising same day if we left the key in the key box which we did. One toilet seat was never repaired at all. A dirty conservatory window (the main reason for the booking), likewise took 5 days to clean. Worst of all the electric gates malfunctioned on Thursday at 10.30am, locking us inside with our car, which was promptly reported to Sykes. Promises kept coming that ‘someone was on there way’, but no one did come, and no updates or call-backs from Sykes at all during the day - in fact the telephone operators, appeared totally disinterested in the issues and were vague throughout on any fixes. We expected the gates to at least be fixed by the change-over day, Friday, but when we went to leave at 8.30am (to beat the traffic build-ups around Newcastle), we were disappointed to find the gate still didn’t work (and the office didn’t open until 9am even on a change-over day), and we, and other apartment guests, were trapped until 10.30am, when a window cleaner finally arrived to release us. It took him all of 5 minutes for him to locate the key, and turn the gates into manual operation, which we could have done ourselves if someone told us where the key was located. The pedestrian electric gate we never did learn how to operate effectively, despite again reporting the issue to Sykes. Other holidaymakers advised of previous problems here also. We believe these electric gate issues, as well as being very inconvenient to us, were probably also a pretty serious safety issue if any emergency arose. Sykes told us it was a separate maintenance company responsible for fixing these problems, which is fine, but it was Sykes we rang to report the problems, and Sykes that then notified the maintenance company, and we don’t understand why even if the maintenance company were non-responsive, why Sykes couldn’t have been proactive in chasing them, and keeping us informed of any developments (of which there was little). They never did, except once on Friday morning, when we said we couldn’t vacate the flat in time, because we couldn’t get out! Due to the level of the problems, we wrote to the Sykes MD (but with no response), and also to the Sykes ‘Customer success’ team (i.e. customer services), who again just passed the buck to the maintenance company, with some pretty erroneous statements in terms of the response times - we have the call logs, as will they, to show the actual response times! They even used a ‘no-reply’ email address, which increased the frustration! We have holidayed with Sykes for decades, with many very successful holiday transactions, but I’m afraid this example was not one of them.