Forest of Arden Marriott Hotel & Country Club

As a Golf member, I cannot speak highly enough of the staff, in the Golf shop, the Zest bar/​restaurant and on the course. Two fantastic courses, set in parkland, challenging in their own unique way. Membership is very reasonable, which includes Leisure membership, discounted Golf shop, pro lessons and visitor green fees, topped up with a very generous discount in the bar and restaurant. When you compare this with other clubs nearby, it surpasses what they offer, and the Championship Arden Course, is easily as good as/​better than the PGA at The Belfry. The Aylesford course, although shorter, requires accuracy, to avoid the traps, trees and water to get to the greens in regulation. Long drivers or Hybrid off the tee, is no good without accuracy. Enjoy, and tell them Glenn sent you.

Lovely spa, hotel and zest bar! Staff were all very friendly and helpful! I have had many good experiences here and would highly recommend to anyone! Changing areas are lovely and clean, with all necessary amenities available. The spa staff were very pleasant and friendly and also the spa area was very clean and professional! I would recommend highly!

This place is beautiful, especially when you’re coming from London where you have to fight for an inch of green space anywhere. Amazing.
RIGHT. I’m first going to say that this is a review for the hotel stay, the wedding reception service they do and the breakfast, as I experienced all three while staying here.
First up, wedding reception. It was beautiful. The room was set apart from the main hotel, down a long corridor and laid out with plenty of room between tables to move around. It meant we had privacy and the happy couple could mingle without coming across other guests (part of the reason why I never want a hotel wedding). We had three bars available so queues were minimal and the staff were discreet but open to questions when serving the wedding breakfast and they even brought us more wine when we asked despite there being a one glass limit for each guest. Now that’s service. Lovely.
Secondly, the hotel stay. We checked in before the wedding started and it seemed to go smoothly. They did charge the card as soon as we gave it to them though, which was a bit weird because they had no idea whether we’d want room service or not. Whatever.
The room itself was nice too. Difficult to find as this hotel seems to have taken mazes to the extreme and there are just endless corridors of rooms that go on for MILES. But once you finally found it, it had all the usual amenities. And the bed was HUGE. King size. We could lie widthways and still not hang off the end. Mental. It also came with complimentary biscuits, tea and a wake-​up call. All perfectly nice.
We had a pretty decent night’s sleep too. They keep the rooms nice and warm, they have a TV with the usual channels on that we dropped off to and the bathroom is far enough away from the bed that you don’t wake anyone up when you potter off and switch the light on. Winner.
I did have a problem in the morning when trying to find the hairdryer though. They’d put it in the TV cabinet. I mean, what?
Finally, the breakfast. Because we were part of a wedding party, we had a private breakfast with the other wedding guests and happy couple in a conference room and this was a really nice touch. Trust me, not many hotels do this. I know from experience after trying to book a similar thing for my wedding at a Marriott local to me.
They had two options really… cereal or a full English. As a yogurt and fruit kind of girl, or maybe the occasional slice of toast, this didn’t really appeal to me but the food was all pretty nice. You went up and grabbed what you wanted and then when you were done, the staff took your plates away so you only really had to move once. They even had mini pastries and muffins. Though who is going for a strawberry danish at 8am? I don’t know.
All in all, our stay at the Forest of Arden was really nice. The wedding was spectacular and they definitely seemed to take a lot of the stress from the bride and groom by handling everything for them so props to them for that. And I haven’t quite managed to get as good a night’s sleep as I did in that hotel since I came back. I’ll have to pay it another visit next time I’m in the area I think.

Three starts for me is meeting the standards. Anything above or below is what I will write about.
The check in process was fantastic. The people at the desk greeted me as a platinum elite member. They told us about the area and offered us a car service to the airport the next day (much cheaper than a cab) the rooms were nice. One thing I will say is that we had a low beam in our room that might be best painted a different color. I banged my head on it a few times. Other than that the room was very nice. The spa staff is really nice. They set up table tennis for me and my daughter to play.
The reason for the 2 stars? The restaurant was very bad. The place was empty and the staff was no where to be found. When I did find someone we had to ask to be seated. They didn’t offer me a kids menu for my daughter, which has lower priced options (everything is already overpriced and kids hardly eat anyway) the service was extremely slow. We had the Caesar salad and fish and chips. The salad was oily not creamy the fish had so many bones and the chips were soggy. I received two drink vouchers as they don’t have an executive lounge so I ordered a beer. While waiting on my meal to arrive the head on my beer left the glass ¾ of the way full. To top it all off I had to find the lady who took our order so that I could pay. 2 hr dinner for fish and chips and salad?
I would recommend staying here if you have low standards on service, but want someplace beautiful to stay.

Nice spa. No wireless anywhere but in a corner at the main bar. Horrible service in the restaurant; slow to serve, then demanding more tip (we had tipped 12% but evidently that was not enough). No late check-​out (even if you are a platinum member of Marriott).