A blue-chip lawyer who expected a week of luxury and fine dining with his family in an idyllic French hotel has been awarded damages after discovering that even the croissants were inedible.
Damen Bennion was looking forward to a ‘gourmet’ experience after spending £6,670 on a stay at the Club Med Opio in Provence with his high-flying accountant wife, Jane, and their two young sons.
The hotel’s website promises that ‘fragrant lavender, the song of cicadas, and the taste of tapenade take you to the heart of Provence’.
But the couple found themselves in a ‘smelly’ room on their first night before being served an ‘awful’ dinner, followed by stale croissants at breakfast the next morning.
‘It’s not hard to get pastries right in France, but they got them wrong,’ Mrs Bennion, 49, told the Central London County Court.
When the couple asked for a different room they were transferred to a dirty and dingy suite where mould dotted the walls.
‘We told our children on the first night that daddy would get things sorted, but it wasn’t sorted,’ Mr Bennion told Judge Justin Althaus.
‘At the end of the week, we as a family went home miserable.’
Damen and Jane Bennion took Club Med to court after spending £6,670 on a luxury holiday in Provence only to find mouldy rooms and stale croissants
The resort, just north of Cannes on the Cote D’Azure, promises that ‘fragrant lavender, the song of cicadas, and the taste of tapenade take you to the heart of Provence’
Mr Bennion, 52, runs his own law firm specialising in deals involving some of the world’s most expensive collectible cars.
His children were ‘excited about all the activities on offer’, when they arrived for their stay in July 2023, while he and his wife planned to ‘sit around the pool and enjoy ourselves’.
But as soon as they arrived they were surprised to be faced with a demand for a parking fee at the ‘all-inclusive’ resort.
And after their disastrous dining experience they decided to take their boys elsewhere, only returning at night to sleep in their mouldy room.
‘The reality was that the resort was so poor in terms of cleanliness that we took the decision that they would be happier with us each day away from the resort,’ Mr Bennion said.
‘That’s not what we had planned to do, we wanted to be there for seven days and sit around the pool and enjoy ourselves.’
Mr Bennion told the court that at the time he was ‘dealing with the purchase of a car which became the most expensive car ever sold’, but did not even have a desk he could work on in his ‘luxury’ room.
‘It wasn’t a happy place to be,’ he explained.
The four-star resort charges up to £2,600 a night for rooms, bit the couple found that their first one was ‘smelly’ and their second dotted with mould
They said they were promised a ‘gourmet’ dining experience but claimed the food was ‘awful’ and they were served stale breakfast pastries the following morning
Mr Bennon told the court they wanted to ‘sit around the pool and enjoy ourselves’, but decided to leave the resort during the day because’ the resort was so poor in terms of cleanliness’
‘The food in the restaurant was awful. To suggest that we could have enjoyed the croissants in the morning was nonsense – they were stale.’
Club Med presented the court with photos of the couple’s room looking attractive and presentable.
But the photos had no date on them and Judge Althaus awarded the couple £3,945 in damages after seeing photos they took which showed the rooms were ‘dirty and showed signs of considerable wear’.
‘One can see the state of the premises, the rooms have mould in them,’ he added.
But he refused to compensate the couple for their dining experience insisting they could not have reached a fair judgement on the basis of two meals.
‘I accept that the breakfast pastries were unimpressive for the south of France,’ he noted.
‘But that doesn’t establish that the food overall was unacceptable.
‘So far as the food was concerned, that was ultimately a matter for the claimants’ own choice.
‘They could have gone back for a second dinner, but they made a decision to eat all their food and their meals out – which I can understand.
‘Our two boys were excited about all the activities on offer’ Mr Bennion told the court
Mr Bennion, who founded his own law firm specialising in classic cars, said he was ‘dealing with the purchase of a car which became the most expensive car ever sold’ at the time
‘But that doesn’t seem to me to establish that the standard of food at the resort overall was the same as they said they found it to be on the night they got there.’
Charging the family for hotel parking was also ‘inconsistent with the representation that they would enjoy an all-inclusive experience’, he ruled,
But he declined to compensate Mr Bennion for providing inadequate work facilities, saying that claim wasn’t supported by the evidence.
‘I am persuaded that there were misrepresentations as to the standard of the resort and that entitles the claimants to general damages,’ he added.
