A family in tears after waiting five hours for € 1,100 Christmas dinner in a chic hotel

A family who paid £ 1,000 for a luxury Christmas dinner said to have left in tears after waiting five hours for food in a 'terrible' Fawlty Towers experience.

Lora Gosling, 41, went with 13 family members and friends to the sumptuous Woodbury Park Hotel for what they hoped would be a decadent holiday meal.

Woodbury Park Hotel / facebook

But they had to wait for hours and the hotel staff located near Exeter, Devon, gave no explanation.

Many people went on social media to complain about this service, with some calling it a "Fawlty Towers" experience.

Simon Griffin wrote on the hotel's Facebook page: "Our experience of the 2018 Christmas dinner was at best" Fawlty Towers! ", Which is not what you expect when you pay £ 300.

Sharon Simpson added: "The Christmas dinner Shambolic, what a disappointment."

In the end, Lora and her family left without eating their prepaid dessert and said that the terrible experience had ruined their Christmas.

Woodbury Park Hotel / facebook

She said: "We arrived at 12:10 for lunch at 12:30 pm We were the first ones there.

"At least we had our main course at the end but we waited an hour for our entree and another three hours for our main course and we had to leave at 5pm without our dessert.

"When we left, other people simply had their say, I relied on the waiting staff.

"They did not stop telling people that it would take them another 10 minutes.

"There were about 30 people with young children who all left around four o'clock without having their main course.

Gosling said the hotel needed to offer everyone a refund.

She said: "We were told that we had to send an email to request a refund and they simply told us not to pay our bill at the bar.

"We asked to see the manager and he was as good as the gold, raising his hands in the air and admitting that they had done very badly and that it was not enough good.

"There were more than 130 people and everyone was totally deflated."

His partner, Darrell Willis, said, "It was horrible, there were so many people upset.It was a disaster."

Christmas dinners at this 56-room hotel were £ 75 per person and in some cases were paid in advance.

John Bishop of Pinhoe, Devon, said that he had left with three other people and that he had paid the full price as a gift to his mother-in-law, but they all left after the first course.

He said: "She was really impatient and it was awful.There were some tears on the way home.

"We spent £ 75 each and came out after two and a half hours with only our first clbad.

"People were proposing to put a pinny and go to help."

Calum Colquhoun, general manager of the hotel, said he would personally speak to individual guests to apologize.

He explained that one of the main ovens had stopped working by the time people started arriving for lunch and that it was "incredibly" disappointing.

He said: "I have been doing this job for a long time and I must say that in terms of problems, the moment could not be worse.

"Some people started arriving early and there was no return.

"The oven had been out of order for an hour, but it was at this critical moment that the time was bad for cooking and everything started to snowball.

"A few people I talked to ate very well, but for many, we just did not eat their food fast enough.

Colquhoun asked the people concerned to contact the hotel.

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