Vista al Paine - Refugio de Aventura

Location, staff, price/quality ratio for the region. The room was very lovely as well.

#1 - Location! Beautiful setting and surroundings. Off away from clump of restaurants and other lodging, so it is peaceful, tranquil, with horses, dogs, birds dotting the landscape. #2 - Oscar! What a great host. Did not meet the other young woman who was there at the time, and I understand there is another woman that works there as they rotate through. If they are like Oscar, the owner/management has three great staff to serve the guests and represent Refugio de Aventura spectacularly. Oscar. Fantastic. #3 - Breakfast. Oscar served up a very nice one the morning we departed.

#1 - No heat in the room! Only wood stove in the living/kitchen area where it was very warm. Left our door open upstairs to hopefully get some warm air inside, but it was a long way for the heat to go. No where on Booking. com does it inform "No heat in individual rooms". #2 - No freely available hot water for shower! If you are not taking a shower early after the generator comes on, you are out of luck. Kept trying to get hot water all night after hearing others in shower, to no avail. #3 - Very limited options provided to store/hang clothing in rooms. #4 - Felt the 177,835CLP was steep for not having #1 or #2 available to us.

The living/dining room was warm, cozy, comfortable. Being the only room that is heated, all guests tended to hang around and socialize, and that was very nice. Most guests also cooked and had dinner together, which made the stay overall very pleasant. This is not possible in hotels, only in this “refugio style” model. The two lovely young women working there were always happy to help out, kept the fire going and provided advice and overall were very nice. Breakfast was fine.

We knew the rooms were not heated, but how cold and uncomfortable was still a surprise. The rooms are expensive, not refugio price levels, so why the owners do not provide heating in rooms and wash rooms to make their guests warm is incomprehensible. The rooms themselves are good, and wash rooms are not bad, so certainly there would be a solution, especially when the living room warms up so easily with the single wood furnace. Using this as a source of heat wouldn’t require power on the whole day, if they managed a way to distribute the heat generated throughout the house. Wifi is only available when power is on, in a corner of the house, very inconvenient. Water pressure in the rooms on 1st floor is very low when power is off. This also would need improvement. We got a message from the property after making a reservation, offering to respond to any questions. We did ask questions regarding petrol availability, which can be an issue given his remote the location is, through Booking and Whatsapp, but unfortunately there was never an answer.