Spa review: I drove from Cork to Belfast to see if this spa resort is as good as it looks on Instagram

Is this the nicest spa resort in Ireland? Denise O’Donoghue drove from Cork to Armagh to see if reality was as good as the Insta image

Some of the spa facilities at The Rabbit in Antrim

We’ve all been there: images of a place or product saturate our social media feeds and, when we finally splurge on it, the reality just isn’t as good. It’s certainly made me more cynical of what I see online, and one such dreamy-looking spa hotel that frequently pops up on Instagram and TikTok for me is The Rabbit.

For a long time now, clips from the spa resort just outside Belfast have been creeping into my algorithm, and I’ve always taken them with a pinch of salt: surely it’s too good to be true? Outdoor pools and hot tubs, a little beach inside a glasshouse, a giant disco ball of immense proportions hanging over a Roman bath-style pool — it sounds far too nice to exist in drizzly Ireland, right?