Dartmouth Oceanview Hotel

What People are saying

very nice hotel

Shawn C on 18/10/2016 15:39

my fiance are live in Dartmouth and like to visit the odd hotels around the HRM and decided to try this place hotel and head over to Halifax. Very nice hotel and room. Nice and quite and had a great view of the Halifax Harbour. Now i see the place is closed which is too bad.

Awsome Value, view and location

TrooperMax on 29/05/2015 04:42

Stayed here 3 times to date. You have a fantastic view of Halifax, I dont think it gets any better. The rooms are simple but the breakfast is good and they each have a cool balcony. Its a sweet place because its cheap and really close drive to downtown Halifax! We just cabbed when we wanted to go clubbing!

This hotel doesn't exist anymore !!!!

Glennis R on 06/03/2015 11:47

I tried booking this hotel week of March 3rd and stated online hotel booked.To advise all viewers the hotel is closed and being turned into apartments but no notice on line.Please post on site so other customers won't be wasting there time trying to book this hotel.

A nightmare

G C on 09/02/2015 04:31

If you have any other option, please take it.

The rooms are draughty, and when we had a driving rain we ended up with puddles inside our room. The rooms are not well insulated, and the heaters are extremely loud and functionally offer "on" and "off" as the only settings (there are degrees of heat but not such that you can set it and leave it), so our options were to blast the heat until it was sweltering and then turn it off, a minute and a half after which it was freezing again. Definitely don't stay here in winter.

The bedsheet was too small for the bed and needed to be remade daily, as it inevitably became untucked and exposed the mattress, often doing so while I slept resulting in my waking with skin against the mattress. This was the case every month, so it wasn't just one faulty bedsheet.

There are no fans in the bathroom or kitchen.

The floor around the kitchen isn't cleaned very well, and there isn't storage space in the room to keep your own vacuum. The fridge has a built-in non-removable beer rack that makes it much less spacious, so if you're planning to cook instead of just reheat leftover takaway and drink, it's far from ideal. Items toward the back of the fridge will freeze.

On the smoking floor, pot smoke poured into our rooms even with the door closed. On the nonsmoking room, we took to keeping the bathroom door closed because we got cigarette stench drifting in at night.

People smoke in the elevators.

When we arrived, construction was just starting. We returned to the room to find a note shoved under the door letting us know that cable TV would be unavailable for a few days while they updated the system. It turned out a construction worker had severed something he shouldn't have, but staff didn't admit that for days. (They made unannounced changes to the wifi and slipped the new password under the door after the fact, so giving notice didn't seem to be a priority.)

But, unmentioned, and in addition to the cable, they broke the phone lines. This was never mentioned - I had to find the house manager and ask. It was also never fixed. They just stopped offering phone service in the rooms. When asked directly about this, the house manager refused to give a straight answer, eventually saying something about how they were changing how the phone service worked and implying there would be no service in the interim. They did offer the lobby phone for guest use, but the lobby was often full of construction workers (and then often a construction site itself), and it was unheated.

They didn't even try to organize the construction to maintain a sense of professionalism. Construction on multiple floors, no doors separating the bit of the first floor they were renovating from the (cold) lobby, rubble left in partially renovated hallways untouched for ages across from occupied rooms. The roof leaked more than once, big spreading puddles visible from the front desk. The hallway across from our room remained partially finished for weeks, and then workers came on a Saturday morning. They apologized for waking me, and said they were told no one was living on that floor (though there was a guest in the room next to ours at the time).

At one point, the elevators were out of order, and the only accessible stairs had recently been painted and were not in use, so we had to wander through the construction area to ask the workers about the location of the second stairwell (through several mostly-demolished rooms).

They do have laundry facilities. They are cold and dirty, the directions posted refer to models of washers and dryers that they don't have, and there is no change machine (and staff cannot make change).

The wifi was terrible. Once, when we had had no connection at all and had decided to go to the library instead, we ran into the house manager in the lobby and mentioned the problem on our way out. He told us that the internet was slow "al over Dartmouth", and that there was nothing he could do. The library's connection was fine. I don't think I ever heard him admit there was any problem with any aspect of the hotel or its services.

They announced the hours after which they would lock the front door and then disregarded those hours and locked the doors early. Twice, they left an alarm blaring in the lobby - once for a whole weekend.

Twice the keycards they issued stopped working. The first time, I had to track down the house manager, who had switched rooms without telling guests (so I knocked on a door to an empty room on the seventh floor before going back down to the lobby to call him). The second time was a Sunday evening, so the front doors were locked. There is no way to contact anyone from outside th lobby. We walked around the neighbourhood looking for a payphone, but the one we were aware of, in the nearby Alderney Gate building, was unavailable, so we returned to the hotel to wait for someone with a working key to happen by, and then called the manager to have our keys replaced once we'd been let in.

They're incapable of scheduling anything. We stayed four months, and every month cleaning was forgotten once (and it wasn't always the last cleaning day of the month, so it wasn't even that there was a larger pattern we were unaware of). When we moved rooms (initially every nonsmoking room was booked, so we took a smoking room for a month), I visited the house manager to ask about the cleaning schedule for our new floor. We had a pleasant chat about the difficulty of scheduling, and he told me that if cleaning staff hadn't come today (Wednesday), they would definitely be in Thursday, and repeated that he would make sure they came Thursday this week so I could schedule around that. That week, cleaning came Friday.

Initially our trash wasn't emptied on cleaning day, and the cleaning staff asked if we had tied up our trash and left it outside our room - we were never told to, so we hadn't. Later we asked the house manager and he said yes, we could leave trash tied up outside our room and it would be taken care of. Later, when our room was not cleaned, we tied up our trash and recycling and put them outside our room, and the house manager came by to scold us for it and tell us to take our trash out ourselves.

Our cleaning day was officially scheduled for Friday, but a few times, staff came by on Wednesday instead. We had received no warning, so had not planned to be out of the room. We asked the cleaning staff about the schedule, which she said she had no control over (which is fine - we just wondered whether she knew what the administration was planning), and I guess she passed our questions on to the house manager because we received another scolding. He showed no memory of our previous chat about having notice and planning our schedule around cleaning days, and we had to interrupt to make that point. After we had, he admitted that that was fair, and told us we would have prior notice next time things were switched. Later that month, our cleaning day was forgotten again.

When rooms are cleaned, staff replace toilet paper. After the first time they missed our day, we asked the house manager for more paper, and were told they no longer offered that service and we would have to buy our own. Every subsequent time our room was cleaned, we received paper, so I don't know what that was about.

In short, this place was a mess. Please stay anywhere else. We would have if we'd had another option (and its location is great, so it does have that going for it), and we left as soon as we could.

Bad timing on our part

MelnBlu on 05/12/2014 12:40

A very comfortable queen bed and pillows - at last, after 21 hotel beds.

Unfortunately, breakfast was not available for guests due to renovations - bad timing on our part. There was a laundry on site, but we did not utilise it. Underground carpark for guests with a suitcase trolley and lift access. From our room # 611, we had no ocean views and wondered why the hotel was so named.

Only a short stroll to the ferry to Halifax.