Hotels : Part 3

Last year, Channel 5 ran a series called The Hotel Inspector, in which respected hotelier Ruth Watson (who you will presumably only have ever heard of if you work in the industry) stays at a hotel, tells them it’s crap and suggests ways of changing the hotel to make it more modern / affordable / profitable depending on the issue that particular hotel is facing. It’s essentially a copycat of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares with less swearing but similarly obstinate and blinkered business owners. Whilst mildly amusing – one episode focussed on Sparkles Hotel in Blackpool which was an ill-conceived children’s hotel that looked at best like a child’s bad dream and at worst a child-snatcher’s paradise – The Hotel Inspector has forced me to come to the conclusion that I have long-suspected – that non-chain hotels in the UK are basically shit.

Like most things these days, we are made to believe that choosing something anti-corporate – farmer’s markets rather than Tesco, a small café rather than Starbucks – is preferable. So it is with hotels; if it’s a Marriott, by implication it must be generic and overpriced and when you wake up in the morning you’ll forget which global city you’re staying in; if it’s a small, family run hotel with a few rooms and personal service, you’ve picked a winner. On paper this looks fine, and certainly very compelling. You have a romantic vision of character properties with about five rooms, each individually decorated, with attentive service and handmade food made with local, organic ingredients. The reality is that this applies to a tiny, tiny proportion of hotels in this country. The vast majority are seedy, dirty little places which by rights aren’t deserving of any customers. Blackpool, according to The Hotel Inspector, has 1800 hotels charging an average of £20 per night. £20 per night! If we work on the principle that the higher the price of something is the better its perceived quality is, then you can’t help but know that you’re not going to get very much for £20 per night. I’d be surprised if you even got a bed for that price. Unless of course that sum is a per-hour rate, which is perhaps more likely.

I used to live in Colchester while studying, and always used to look lovingly at the Peveril Hotel on North Hill. It seemed to exude an old-worldly character with its half-timbered exterior and imposing arched doorway. Whenever I walked past it I wondered what it would be like to stay there. A few years after graduating, my ex-girlfriend and I went back to Colchester for the university summer ball, and stayed at the Peveril. What a mistake. The place may have looked antediluvian from the outside, but from the inside it resembled the kind of place that the council put Eastern European migrants and those on benefits until suitable social housing is available. It was dirty, the bed sagged and the TV didn't work. I was violently sick after the ball in the dismal little bathroom (separated from the main room by, I kid you not, a garden gate) and I swear it was because of the lack of cleanliness in the hotel. Okay, perhaps it was from the alcohol. It was a stinker, as was the place we also stayed at that year in Kingston-upon-Thames which was equally ramshackle and dilapidated. This does rather colour one’s impression of small, non-chain hotels, and it was with some relief that I started to stay in larger, cleaner and better equipped places as my career began.

There are of course some exceptions to the ‘small hotel equals bad hotel’ rule. Strattons, for example, is a family-run hotel in Swaffham, Norfolk with a handful of exquisite suites designed for couples looking for a romantic getaway. It is also a socially-responsible hotel with a real focus on recycling and composting waste, growing their own vegetables and conserving energy. They have cats in the lobby and lounge, chickens in the front garden, and one of the best menus in the whole of Norfolk, although the dinner arrangements (waiting in the lounge to peruse the menu with a glass of wine and whoever else is also waiting for their table) left a little to be desired. Their kedgeree on the breakfast menu is however probably the single best breakfast you will ever eat in any eatery in the world, period. But it’s not cheap; it’s more expensive than most Norfolk hotels, but it is truly worth the price. Moving from the east to the west, Mount Haven Hotel in Marazion, near Penzance is also a shining example of a well-run independent hotel benefiting from well-designed contemporary rooms, bespoke artwork (which can be purchased) and an excellent raised, decked patio which overlooks St Michael’s Mount. Again, it’s not cheap; but again it’s worth it. The owner (Orange Trevillion) is as mad as the aforementioned Mrs Sparkles, but well-meaning, although attempts to create a relaxing paradise with statues of Buddha and incense sticks was rather lost on me.

Okay, so views on big chains and the odd example of good independents aside, the hard and indisputable facts are that hotels from the large or even moderately-sized chains are going to be better. I defy you to disagree.

At the most basic level, the profits that these hotel companies make mean that they continually invest in and enhance their facilities, and their financiers and corporate backers are always going to lend them money. By being broadly oligopolistic in competition terms, the big chains basically determine what the smaller hotels need to offer in order to survive. I stayed at a hotel, which I believe was three star, in Earl’s Court about ten years ago. This hotel only had three rooms which were en suite; now everyone expects a hotel to have all rooms to have en suite facilities. The large chains can renovate their rooms efficiently and quickly to respond to enhanced customer expectation, whereas something like this customer-led demand could force a small hotel out of business, either through not having the funds to complete the work or through guests choosing a hotel with such facilities over theirs. By offering something that another large chain doesn’t offer – complimentary bottled water in the room, as an example – that chain basically creates a precedent that the other hotels must follow; they essentially create that heightened customer expectation, simply because they can.

The Smith Family recently took a trip to Cornwall. This is more or less an annual ritual since my sister moved there a few years back, and a combination of genuine interest in the area as well as familial duty means that going to Cornwall has become a feature of each subsequent year’s holiday plans. However, the fact remains that Cornwall is A Long Way Away. No matter how you cut it, travelling from anywhere north west of Bristol to Cornwall is a bitch of a journey, not helped any by the fact that my sister and her husband have decided to make their home in Penzance, which is about as far west as you can go in this country without running out of land. So, after a particularly difficult journey last time, we resolved this time that we’d try to make the journey work for us rather than against us.

In so doing we experienced the best and perhaps worst of independent hotels; nothing quite so distasteful as Sparkles (as I write this I am now actually on my way, like a condemned man, to Blackpool; thankfully toward the Hilton rather than aforementioned fleapit, but actually it could be quite amusing to see that place for real), but poor nonetheless. In an effort to make the journey from Milton Keynes to Cornwall more enjoyable (not that I find long car journeys in any way enjoyable anyway), we decided to stay in Bath for a night. Bath’s a place I've been through many times on the train before but I've never stopped there. The closest I've got to stopping there was a few months back when the train I was on got stopped outside the station, the reason being that a man on the train in front, Wild (South) West style, was holding up the train with a pistol. But, that aside, Bath is about halfway along the journey from home to Penzance, and it just seemed like a good place to spend a night.

We stayed at a B&B called Oldfields, on Wells Road. Oldfields is a Victorian villa built from (what else) Cotswold stone and was one of the best places we’ve ever stayed. The staff were really friendly and helpful, telling you about the local area and where to go, and they couldn’t have done more for us in terms of making sure that our daughter had everything she needed. The room itself was perfect for what we wanted – nice and spacious, traditional without looking old-fashioned with views across their beautifully-maintained garden. We even had a four-poster bed which rather made me think that I was a visiting dignitary. We also managed to find a creative way of avoiding the same thing that happened in Manchester a few months back where Seren slept in the same room as us leaving us with no choice but to sit very still and talk very quietly in the dark; the en suite bathroom was enormous, and so we put her travel cot in there, affording us a modicum of normality.

Contrast this with Driftwood, where we stayed whilst in Cornwall. Driftwood sits atop a cliff in North West Cornwall and was recommended to us by a friend and her husband, and also the sleek Mr & Mrs Smith hotel directory, from which the aforementioned Strattons was also chosen. We specifically booked Driftwood because of those recommendations, and also because we secured the ‘cabin’ which was separate from the hotel and included a second bedroom for Seren, plus a lounge, kitchenette etc. It just seemed to suit our needs perfectly. The hotel is a top scorer on the TripAdvisor website, and so we were prepared to be blown away.

First, the positives. The view from the cabin was, without question, breathtaking. On the first night, we sat in our lounge eating a meal and barely spoke – we just sat transfixed by the sea and the sun slowly setting over the English Channel. And we did indeed benefit from having a second bedroom, although on the second and indeed final night Seren was too unsettled to sleep in that room and slept in our room, so it was ultimately pointless, but the idea was there. That’s about all the positives I can find, and one of those only turned out to be half positive but it was hardly the hotel’s fault, so we shall now quickly move on to the negatives.

The biggest negative was the apparently positive positioning of the cabin away from the hotel. It was certainly away from the hotel, there’s no denying that. It was across a small field which sloped down toward the cliff top, through a gate, down a series of moss-covered steps, and through another gate. The steps ran past the gate to the cabin and on to a private beach and the cabin was out of view of the main hotel. The first night I was too worn out by the journey to think about it, plus a bottle of red wine certainly helped, but on the (sober) second night I began to feel distinctly uneasy. If we’d collectively slipped on the moss or if anyone had come to the cabin in the middle of the night and murdered or us or snatched Seren (a real parental concern in June, post Madeleine McCann’s disappearance), no-one would have ever known until we were supposed to check out as there was no CCTV. And on that second night I kept imagining just how chilling it would be to hear the sound of footsteps in the gravel outside the cabin. It’s been a while since I read a Stephen King novel but it wouldn’t have been a bad setting for that kind of tale.

Then there was the unevenness of the floor. It really felt like the whole structure was a gust of wind away from blowing off the cliff top into the sea, but mostly it was the fact that the cabin felt like an afterthought, an opportunity by the proprietors (well-spoken ex-Londoners) to make a bit more cash, since whereas the main hotel appeared to have been repainted and rebuilt, the cabin felt like it was decaying and crumbling away and had merely been painted; the only thing connecting it to the main hotel was the colour scheme and the trinkets and objects in the rooms. It reminded me of a chalet my parents, sister and I stayed in during a rainy Whitsun holiday in Weston-Super-Mare. I suspect the effect they were going for was ‘quaint’ or ‘New England’. I just thought ‘potential death trap’. Oh, and did I mention the spiders and woodlice?

It cost us a small fortune and I'd never go back. I envied the well-to-do couples arriving in their Mercedes with matching Louis Vuitton luggage knowing that they were staying in the main hotel, where you were entitled to a tray of tea in the morning as a wake-up call. Alarm bells did ring when the receptionist on the night we arrived (a gormless kitchen porter) went through the motions of explaining about the tea tray and then rapidly back-pedalled when he saw where we were staying.

So, where do I stand now? Give me a large chain any day of the week.