Ski holiday day 1: It's not my fault - right?

Sam has organised this year's ski holiday. I know that I'm going to Sainte-Foy in the Tarentaise and I've been there before to snow-shoe, but not to ski. I've had nothing to do with the chalet booking, the dates chosen and even the travel arrangements have been somewhat decided for me in that Sam and Lucy chose to fly to Geneva and then have an overnight stop in Annecy (where we were to pick them up).

I might have been a bit grumpy about a diversion (short-cut, as Sam described it) via Annecy, but I didn't really mind and it's been nice not to have to have worried at all about the planning of this trip.

I didn't really get organised on the few things I had to do until the week before when I booked the ferry, booked a hotel (so we could break the journey overnight), cleaned the car, checked the tyres, found all my ski gear and also grabbed some Euros via the post office.

As is usual people were checking whether I'd done this or that and questioning the logic of my decisions.

We were going via ferry? Why not the tunnel? It's quicker and easier; it's been very windy - will the crossing be rough? Will the ferries even be running?

Where are you staying overnight? Why Mâcon? What's there? My choice of hotel (an Ibis Budget) also raised a few eyebrows, particularly when it transpired that our friends (who are also on holiday, although not with us) are paying more per day for their dog to be looked after than we are for our hotel!

Anyway, it all seemed to make sense to me. Cases were packed, luggage just about crammed in and we left at 7am on Saturday morning to catch the 11am ferry from Dover to Calais. It was actually a beautiful morning, very bright and sunny so that I needed my sunglasses as we headed south east into the low sun through Kent.

The ferry was on time, the crossing super smooth and it was sunny all the way. I later discovered there had been a fire on a lorry in the Channel Tunnel and had we booked that then we'd have suffered severe delays. That was a stroke of luck (I knew my decision making was flawless).

The sunshine continued as we drove through France and everything seemed rosy until we shipped up at the Ibis Budget, Mâcon Nord.

It is a hotel designed as a cheap stop-over for travellers, so it's right next to the toll booth by the autoroute. Even in the dark, the location isn't great and there are three hotels side by side - Ibis Budget, Formula 1 and Novotel. Margaret said she wished we were staying at the Novotel, which looked like the Ritz in comparison.

In Ibis Budget reception, things took a turn for the worse. It was a dreary place, very untidy and with open storeroom doors giving a view of boxes and linen. A young lad was on reception and his English was about as good as my French. He said he didn't have a record of our booking and I was at the wrong hotel. He then started a 10-minute telephone conversation with someone and was completely uninterested in helping me.

I knew I had the right hotel because the Ibis website will programme your sat-nav and I'd transferred the hotel code to my TomTom, which had brought me there. What's more, I had a confirmation e-mail and a booking code on my phone. The only question was: would my phone battery last longer than the receptionist's telephone conversation?

It did; he agreed we were in the right hotel and that I had a booking reference number. The problem was that his computer didn't know anything about it. It turns out that the one bit of really good English that he knows is: "You agree, it's not my fault right?"

He said he had a room, he agreed we had a booking, but he couldn't release the room because we weren't on his computer. It was almost like a Little Britain comedy sketch (the computer says no). His solution was that we should pay for a room and then perhaps his manager would sort it out in the morning.

I wasn't at all sure his manager would sort it out; I was getting very grumpy about the whole thing; I have a Yorkshireman's aversion to being asked to pay for what I've already paid for and so I told him that I agreed it wasn't his fault, but I wouldn't be staying there and we walked out.

Margaret celebrates her stay at Novotel,

Mâcon Nord with a glass of wine.

You have to be careful what you wish for - a saying with more than a ring of truth about it that night as I walked into the Novotel reception to see if they had a room. They did, they were jolly nice and friendly, the place had a dining room, so we could have food, drink and breakfast. It cost me €200 instead of €35 (although dinner wasn't budgeted in the last one).

The holiday is just 12 hours old and already I have a major complaint. I'll give Ibis such a shit review on Trip Adviser ... whoops, it turns out that several dozen people have beaten me to it! I particularly liked the story about the dog convention when the place was full of barking dogs and this chap was trying to get some sleep ...

I should have read Trip Adviser before booking - perhaps we'd have gone straight to the Novotel and missed out this little experience altogether.