Barry's Bay Paradise

Thank you for your review and glad you had a great stay. In our opinion great stays in great cottages like ours deserve 5 stars! Our cottage offers authentic experience of being in a true North Canadian cabin. But at the same time we offer as many of comforts of home as possible. Thank you for including pictures of those. The internet is a standard Bell internet that’s available in Barry’s Bay Area. It probably holds up better than in any average day in GTA. We have worked, did school work and watch Netflix there without any issues whatsoever. We also have extra light bulbs in the kitchen if any of them burn out.

There is absolutely no problem with hot water at the cottage. As with any other house and especially a cottage in the woods if several people shower in a row the hot water pump needs time to heat up the next boiler of water. All it needs is maybe not taking showers for ALL people at the same time! This cottages hosted much larger families with many kids without any hot water issues for the last 9 years! This is not an apartment building in the city connected to commercial city boiler but a cottage on the lake in the woods and it seems guest had no experience with such. He also did not follow hot tub instructions by leaving hot tub uncovered in winter overnight and was not happy it was difficult to bring the temp up again. In result it seems we received this low score from the guest.

Dear Lizel. Our cottage has regular cleaning by our cleaning crew several times a week including dusting, vacuuming cleaning kitchen and washrooms, as we are usually fully booked. We have recently upgraded all our linen which are washed and changed after each guest. The pillow might have been fluffed by a cleaning crew with the hand and not someone’s head. Moreover all our lines are changed every time so we find it hard to believe the lines had dirt or hair on it. In terms of no water at the time when you arrived, there was a power outage in the area which is common in cottage country. I spoke to you within less than an hour of your arrival and helped your husband to turn the water back on, this statement of water being back on “later” is also not accurate as it was turned on right away after your arrival. Same with the dishwasher which did not finish its cycle due to power outage. On the other hand our family was very disappointed with your very challenging communication with us. You expressed your very strong disappointment with no AC at our cottage however we do not list the cottage as having AC. You arrived in the last afternoon of heat wave and we tried to help your family and despite having 7 ceiling funs, our cottage manager brought you 2 portable ones. We asked you if received them and if you are happy with them but you never responded. Despite us trying to communicate with you for the next 3 days you have not responded to us, after the 1st few messages from you expressing disappointment with AC & the water issue. We are sorry to hear that our cottage did not live up to your expectations however we would have appreciated a better communication from your part towards us. To our future guests our family takes pride in this cottage and we strive for great cottage experience for our guests. If something gets missed by our cleaning crew while attending to this large cottage and property please let us know and we are more than happy to correct the issue.