The hotel is great in almost every aspect. The only problem is that, for the usual rate, it does not feel like you are getting what you paid for. The room is confortable, the bed is super comfy, the spa is average, the restaurant is good. But it takes some courage to charge you 60 euros for a bottle of wine in the restaurant that was produce at the bodega and it is being sold for 20 euros in the store at the hotel. Too much for a wine service. The breakfast is “a la carte”. It may sound great, but it really isn’t. The options are limited and the service is far from being stellar. As a point for reference, at the same period I soent a couple of days at Castillo Termal Monasterio de Valbuena. It cost me half the price and there is simply no point to start a comparison between the two. Castilla Termal is WAY superior in every single aspect, from the checkin in a contortable chair while you drink cava, to the breakfast, to the whole ambience at the hotel. I would easily recommend Marques de Riscal if the rate would be half of it. At the current rate, nothing can justify it, not even the beautiful architecture and the great view.

My wife and I have been to more than 20 wine regions around the world. We are neophiles of the wine´s world and gastronomy. We had a great experience dining with our wine friends at the Gastronomico restaurant last saturday. The service from sommelier Aline was brilliant and fancy. She answered all our questions with high knowledge and skill. The waitress was very professional. The manager was also involved in the service taking care of details. Mr. Vasc was on other tasks, but he had the courtesy to go and greet us at the table. All very well coordinated. They make a great team. The tasting menu is well prepared and the service is elegant. The place is unique. Vielen Dank. D.

The hotel is breathtaking and we really enjoyed the vineyard visit session. But we were there for my birthday and it was a surprise that my husband tried to organize with hotel’s team to bring a bday cake right at 12 o’clock at night. The cake came 30 mins later and they asked if we wanted a candle as well, it must be a joke. Other than that, we tried the Michelin restaurant in the hotel and it was nowhere close to Michelin standarts. We even shared this feedback with the restaurant team and they said “we agree”. Another moment must be a joke. Overall I can only give 3 out of 5 thanks to the decoration and the vineyard tour.

We stayed at the this hotel for three nights beginning Christmas Day. We splurged on the Gehry Suite, which was the best decision we could have made. It was like staying in a tree house, perched in a beautiful piece of art, with the most spectacular view. Everyone at the hotel was wonderfully accommodating, with a special acknowledgment for Marcelo in the Bar. Both restaurants were wonderful, but the Michelin Star Restaurant was the star. We loved everything about this place including the spa and winery. Do yourself a favor and stay here for at least three nights, there is so much to see and do around the hotel (Burgos, Bilbao, LaGuardia, Logroño, etc.). Staying here was just magical!

We are well traveled having lived in 10 countries and having visited almost 110. During our Rioja trip we stayed at three different properties and were really looking forward to our stay at Marques de Riscal. However, it ultimately turned out to be a complete disappointment. It seems to draw foreign tourists based on its impressive Gheary façade and high price point. However, if you remove the Gehry façade it is a fairly basic Marriott (i.e. way overpriced for what it is) in a fairly boring town. It’s a classic don’t “judge a book by its cover” since although the cover of this hotel is impressive on the outside, the inside is really not that nice at all and the service is sub-par (i.e. corporate feel, no friendliness or warmth from the check-in desk etc). In fact, if you were take out the red carpet from the hallways, on the inside it feels very much like the interior of a hospital with a weird layout to get from your room in the spa section to the restaurants. The restaurants are also dated and feel tired, they’re in need of a complete refurbishment. The spa was ok but the steam room was unusable since it stunk of body odor (it should obviously be disinfected on a daily basis). The design of the rooms was fine (we had a spa room with balcony) but compared to other properties we stayed at in Rioja (see below) the views were not that special given that you’re also overlooking the car park. A couple of things we found annoying with the room is that there is a green evacuation light by the door which illuminates the room quite a lot at night (we like dark rooms to sleep). Furthermore, there is a large glowing / luminescent evacuation plan on the wall which makes the room even brighter after the lights are turned off (we had to take it off the wall and place it face down on the floor in order to sleep without being bother with so much light). Finally, many of the English channels listed on the TV simply didn’t work (e.g. CNN and Comedy Central etc). The internet wasn’t great, we got knocked off several times and had to keep reentering our login information several times (no idea why hotels without neighbors don’t just have an open network). The “turn-down” service was an embarrassment, they half-heartedly made the bed and took out the trash … but left everything else “as is” (leaving empty water bottles in the room and everything unorganized including used towels etc) … which was not would we have experienced at any other five-star hotel where towels / bath products etc are usually folded and organized. My wife also noted that the towel left for the bidet was the exactly the same ones left as face cloths. With respect to the F&B, our experience was awful. We first had lunch at the wine bar and ordered olives and bread to start, the Hake fish for my wife, the “pasta with vegetables” for me and a garden salad to share. The bread never came until the main meal, the Hake fish was fried and not very fresh, the “pasta with vegetables” came with a poached egg and no vegetables, and the salad came with anchovy sauce (even though I had let them know that I am vegetarian and the dish is not described as having anchovies or any fish products in it). I don’t eat fish and the anchovy salsa had a very strong fish taste. We sent it back and they “adapted” it by providing a new salad with no dressing at all (i.e. just dry rugula). We ate the tomatoes and cheese in the salad but didn’t eat the salad itself since dry rugula has no taste. Instead of providing a salad with no dressing, they should have first asked us if we still wanted it (in which case we would have declined). When we didn’t eat it, they should have asked if there was a problem but instead they simply removed it from the table and left it on the bill. They also brought us some parmesan cheese but it was rancid. For our evening meal, we had previously been in touch with their namesake restaurant, Restaurante Marques de Riscal, ahead of time since one of us is vegetarian and one is pescatarian. They said that they could “adapt” the menu but wouldn’t commit to anything specific. Unlike great Michelin restaurants which have a dedicated vegetarian menu (e.g. Piazza Duomo in Alba), in our experience that usually means simply removing all the expensive ingredients (e.g. cavier, foie etc) without any effort to actually cook something good that is vegetarian. So we decided to pass on their main restaurant and made a reservation at their other restaurant (called 1860) instead since it also offered an a-la-carte menu. We went to 1860 in the morning to view the dinner menu and there were no vegetarian main dishes listed at all. There was no one in the restaurant to assist, so we called them from our room an hour later (no answer). We called again later in the day and again no answer. We therefore emailed the hotel and got the standard “we’ll adapt the menu” response which was concerning given the “adapted” salad (i.e. no dressing) that we received earlier in the day. I wrote back asking for specifics since we wanted a good restaurant and I told them that I don’t know how you can “adapt” a main dish when all of their main dishes were purely meat or fish dishes. They wrote back repeating again that they could “adapt” the menu which was totally unhelpful and a little offensive given the efforts we had made. I responded back to them with a stronger tone (and also included the general manager) but never received any further response prior to the reservation. So we went to the restaurant at the time of our reservation and explained the situation. The waitress had no idea of anything vegetarian on the menu so she called another gentleman. He ran through the menu with us in real-time but determined himself that the tasting menu wouldn’t work since it wasn’t vegetarian. He also determined that there were no main dishes that were vegetarian but could “adapt” appetizers (e.g. appetizer of rice without quail = rice; appetizer of mushrooms and foie gras without foie gras = mushrooms). Fortunately we had a car so we left to another town. It was frustrating since it is around a 20-minute drive to Logrono and the good restaurants there were already fully-reserved (which is why I had been pushing the hotel earlier in the day for a proper answer regarding their “adaptations” particularly after our initial bad experience at their wine bar restaurant). Overall, the F&B experience was terrible, dishes completely misdescribed and no desire to try to properly cater to anyone with any dietary restrictions (which is really surprising for a Marriott property listed as being “5-star”). The quality of the breakfast was fine but there was no buffe (i.e. it was simply a la carte (breads / pastries / fruit / yoghurt and made-to-order eggs) which was quite surprising relative to other “five-star” hotels of a similar size. Given the high nightly rate, we left utterly disappointed. The manager ultimately responded to my email and claimed to not like anchovies and to have previously been vegetarian himself which made the whole thing even more bizarre and surprising. I took the time to write a very detailed email regarding our experience but, based on his response, I don’t think he really understood the serious nature of our F&B complaint. We expected Marques de Riscal to be the highlight of our trip and it turned out to be completely disappointing. We had great experiences at other properties (Amor & Locura room at Castillo El Collado; Javier there provides the warmest “5-star” service and the turn-down service there put Marques de Riscal to shame even though it’s listed as being in a far lower category). The following night we had a booking at a proper Michelin star restaurant (i.e. Nublo based in Haro) who were super-accommodating for vegetarian and pescatarian diets from the time of our initial contact. We also stayed at Palacio Tondon (another Marriott property) in Haro which we enjoyed far more. The chef there went out of his way to create vegetarian dishes and his food was absolutely delicious. We also found Haro to be a much better town than El Ciego (where Marques de Riscal is based) since there are several great vineyards close together in the area known as “Estacion” (e.g. Muga, Lopez de Herrederia / Vina Tondonia, Bodegas Roda) and great restaurants (e.g. Nublo). A room with a river view in Palacio Tondon represents much better value than Marques de Riscal and the level of service / friendliness was also far superior to Marques de Riscal. In addition, although it doesn’t have the flashy Ghery exterior, the interior design at Palacio Tondon is also far better and more modern.