Complaints about the Grand Hotel in Hyères is a post revealing the bad experience lived by english tourists.
« The « Iles d’Or » hotel is the largest and best hotel in Hyères, and is kept in excellent style, and with a good table and attendance.
Its rooms are, however, small, the lower ones narrow, and the upper ones narrow and low. This state of things is accounted for by its having originally been built as a hospital, though our modern notions would scarcely admit the excuse as valid.
There is a wing, or dépendance, at either end.
The passages are long and tortuons, and hence draughty, although provided with doors-which no one shuts-to isolate the different parts of the house.
Complaints have been made in former seasons that imaginary extras were too apt to be inserted in the visitor’s bills, and I have heard of » cork money » being charged for brandy bought privately and used as a medicine upstairs, and of other persons finding the expense of the calorifère, or heating apparatus, put down in their bills.
This sort of hotel management deserves the strongest reprobation, and I allude to it in the interests of the public, though I trust it is now a thing of the past.
The » Iles d’Or » hotel has excellent gardens, not only behind it on the flank of the Château Hill, but also on the south side of the Boulevard National. »
Complaints about the Grand Hotel in Hyères is a post that goes back to…1879. The story is reported in » The Riviera », a book written by Edward Issac Sparks.