Hotel Novotel di Belo Horizonte

Summary: Novotel BH provides a comfortable stay, with an excellent on site restaurant, but some service quality issues with the front desk staff take the shine off the experience. The good: Room: room is large compared to other Novotel I have stayed at recently. Big, comfortable bed and a large, hot, high-pressure shower. Excellent black out curtains and in room AC. Nice views of the city as well and surrounding hills. I got to enjoy a spectacular lightning storm on my last night. Restaurant: the on site restaurant is excellent, so much so I left a seperate review for that. Sebastiao and the restaurant team are fantastic and so was the food. Housekeeping: thank you to the team for their excellent service each day. Including leaving me a nice note when they heard my guest was unwell the night before and provided new towels and sheets on request without any issues. The bad: Accor status recognition: there was no recognition of my gold status on check-in and the welcome gift was a strange keychain/bottle opener; rather than the standard water or food item that I would have much preferred. A welcome note was left in the room, but in Portuguese. Front desk: check-in was a rough experience. When I arrived there were four staff, none who were serving customers and they all nudged each other while giggling to gesture for someone else to serve me. This property does share an entrance with the adjacent Ibis Budget - from this experience I thought I may have entered the wrong hotel. There is extremely limited English spoken by the front desk staff as well, my check in was conducted via grunts and nods. Keycard: thankfully not as bad as my recent experience at the Novotel in Rio, but my keycard stopped working twice during my three night stay - forcing me to waste time going to the front desk. Conclusion: with some retraining and enhancements to the service provided by the front desk, this hotel could easily become a four star rating. Right now, it’s just average in my opinion.