Sandy Lane Hotel: Not everyone loves Simon Cowell's fave getaway

Sandy Lane Hotel

Madame Arcati is most concerned for Simon Cowell. He's presently recuperating at Barbados' luxury Sandy Lane hotel, as he does every year after his X Factor exertions, knocking back crates of yeast-free Japanese beer. But I see not everyone is impressed with the 5* accommodation where some suites cost £10,000 a night (or so the tabloids tell us: Michael Winner has related to me that he only spends £2,500- 3,000 a night. What a cheapskate).

At the Tripadvisor site, former guests tell of their time at the hotel - here's an unedited selection.. A Mr Trig of Toronto, Canada, who stayed at the Sandy Lane in November of this year, moans: "Unfortunately we found a soiled female undergarment in our room and it was dealt with very poorly." Well, perhaps it was just a rare slip...

Then again, Andrew Berry of Scotland, reports: "It’s the little things like the TV remote falling to bits, problems with the internal wifi connection, the problems with sunbeds and restaurant reservations." As Simon would say, these are high-class problems.

L Gallagher of Portugal is incandescent: "The service at breakfast was horrendous, when you were seated they would take your tea and coffee order and you would be lucky if this turned up before the end of your breakfast, on most occasions we had to chase the waitress for our tea, housekeeping left us fluffy bath towels when we arrived in our room, but as the week progressed the quality of the towels deteriorated, this was not a massive issue, but for the price that you pay to stay at this hotel I think the towels should be good quality not the quality you expect to find in a 3 star hotel."

In between the several rapturous encomia ("Fantastic!"; "The most wonderful place ever") a surprising number of complaints whinny up. Tennis Rose of Alabama plainly did not realise that the Sandy Lane is not so-called for nothing: "After you land its at least a 90 minute ride on bumpy dusty curvy roads....maybe we took a short cut but I will not be going back to Barbados.... "

In a fine piece of reportage, Ho-Hum of Surrey says the hotel owner likes to hog the swimming pool all to himself when he's in residence and claims the proprietor kicked her partner out of the pool on three occasions. She concludes, "So, have a great holiday if you can bear that the staff are terrified of the selfish, rude owner (Irishman in his late 60's); we couldnt and yes it really spolied our stay, well it would, would'nt it ?"

Merry Christmas, Simon!