Mansion Hotel & Spa

The only saving grace for this hotel was to be staying ‘in’ but of course not ‘really in’ Werribee Mansion, which was our reason for booking.   The Mansion is worth visiting if you ‘do’ history, but the ‘setup’ for tourists seems stuck back in the year it opened to the public, 1977!!  Anyway, back to the hotel - it really was not good but I’ll start with a positive: if you get the rate with local inclusions that helps to make it not bad ‘value’ (sort of). Wine tasting, mini golf, mansion tour, drink vouchers and breakfast all of course have some value if you do use them all. But a big warning - the breakfast in Joseph’s is a complete joke - it was the most un-5 star breakfast we’ve ever experienced on so many levels.  It’s not worth wasting the keystrokes to explain other than to say that a roadhouse hot breakfast dish might have looked better! The room is of 3-4 star standard. If this hotel thinks it is 5 star, then it’s only from ticking the boxes by having all the ‘facilities’ provided on site (spa etc), not from presenting 5 star rooms. Other reviewers have been quite correct in their comments that they’ve be never visited such a poor ‘5 star’ hotel. It needs a makeover DESPERATELY!! We had a soulless dark room with a terrible bathroom - a clinical cold stainless bench is not ‘cool’ even if it was some strange fashion idea say 15+ years ago! And the bath (shower over bath) was so narrow it was dangerous to stand in without almost toppling over.  Welcome drinks vouchers - thanks! So we go to sit in the library … oh the fireplace is out of order so that room has no appeal… but the bar itself and foyer area was as soulless as the rooms, so back to the fireless library!! We definitely would not stay again.  It has the potential to be so so much more.  The other positives - obviously lovely to be able to take a morning walk in the mansion grounds, having plenty of parking, and receiving a friendly welcome at the desk - did not even help to notch it up another point for this review.

We stayed here for several nights and some things are good and others not so good. Starting with the good points. 1. The dinner we had was excellent and although pricey it was worth it. 2 it has old world charm 3 excellent indoor heated pool 4 surrounded by botanic gardens and next to the Werribee zoo And the not so good. 1 . The road into the property is unsealed and really poorly maintained 2. The heritage rooms are quite small 3 the dining room has very little atmosphere and the carpet needs replacing. So my advice is stay in the deluxe rooms, do not have high expectations of the breakfast but come here if you are looking for old world charm.

We booked our accommodation in September 2025 through Booking.com and this was accepted. Our booking formed part of my 60th birthday gift from my husband. He thought it would be ideal for me to experience this spa hotel, especially as the architecture is old which I personally love and it has a good reputation and is located outside of the city. On 20th March 2026 we received an email indicating that our booking for 11-13 May 2026 was going to be cancelled. We were given the option to relocate to their sister hotel in Melbourne city. We choose this hotel because it was not in the city. We contacted the hotel directly and advised them that we don’t want to change hotels and asked the reason for this cancellation. Their response was “operational reasons”. We feel this is an unacceptable blanket reason, frankly it tells us nothing. What does this mean. Have they cancelled all other bookings as well. Did they just get a booking for a longer stay and did not have capacity to accommodate without cancelling our booking, we do not know. We are due to fly to Australia in April so this last-minute cancellation has caused significant stress and anxiety to us both as we have now had to alter our travel plans and find other accommodation in the area of this hotel at last minute. We have now booked new accommodation but because they cancelled so late we have had to compromise on what we would have liked because the selection was limited due to booking so close to our travel time unless we were prepared to pay an additional 300-400 + Aus dollars. We also had a reservation for 4-5 May 2026. We have cancelled this as we have no confidence that they would honour this booking either. All we would say to travellers considering booking this hotel is beware. Clearly there is a reliability issue. We won’t be booking this hotel chain again.