Occasionally, you’ll get lucky and be pleasantly surprised – but, before you even walk through the door, you know when you’ve picked a lemon. It’s usually a hotel where the rooms cost around 100 Euros a night, as opposed to the sort where the simplest of breakfasts will set you back a similar amount.
The room is rarely available for check in – the maid is probably still sweeping dead insects off the bedspread onto the floor. ‘Executive’ rooms on a budget usually overlook car parks, air-conditioning vents or lightwells. Cooking smells waft in through net-curtained windows – and there’s a lingering aroma of smoke from pre-ban days. The carpet is slightly sticky underfoot.
Lift apparatus kerplunks up and down all night long. At 2 am someone tries to open your door. Thank god you secured it with the chain. There’s a constant drone of traffic from the road outside. A fish market opens at the crack of dawn. Then the headboard vibrates with irritatingly regular knocking from the wall behind. At 7.30 am a workman starts drilling in a room nearby.
However traumatizing the experience, we uncomplaining Brits are easily palmed off with a plastic kettle and a Courtoisy hairdryer…
Gosh yes, give me a little packet of shortbread biscuits and some Moulton Brown mini shampoos and I’ll put up with anything
Do you think men are more likely than women to put up with shabby treatment? My husband booked a double and a twin room at a Radisson Edwardian in London for us and our young teenaged children. We went first to the twin room which was a beautifully appointed suite with a huge bedroom, a sitting room and enormous bathroom. Then we went up many stairs (beyong the level of the lifts!) to a poky little room, smaller than their bathroom, overlooking a brick wall. The bed was pushed against the wall and there was nothing but a chest of drawers and small wardrobe. Never mind, says husband, it’s only for a night! While he was recovering from the blow from my handbag, I rang housekeeping and we had a new room and a bottle of champagne within minutes.
As a child we used to go en famille to France every summer and my mother and sisters would sleep in hotels whilst my father, my brother and I slept in the car in the hotel carpark
The whole plot of A Room with a View in fact rests on the premise that women care about nice rooms, whereas men see them as sleeping machines. Bed, shower, toilet, chair – what other functions are required?
Trouser press
..for hanging stuff on
Telly.
Gazing on the gratuitous (same root as gratuit) hair-dryer I was pondering that, but I have a feeling that the French – in my relatively limited experience of their hotels – don’t do them
Remote control
I’m inordinately happy when there are tea and coffee making facilities. Especially if there are a couple of bags of Twinings Earl Grey in the mix. Even in the posh places, it beats room service which is expensive, untimely, imprecise and invasive.
“Storm in a tea cup as Earl Gray fans complain at new recipe”:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wirecopy/8728203/Storm-in-a-tea-cup-as-Earl-Gray-fans-complain-at-new-recipe.html
Yes, I’d settle for a disadvantaged room that had a dryer that elegant. Mind you, losing most of my hair in my early 20s means I haven’t actually used one since Blair became PM, so for me, when I’m dryer-shopping, style is very much the primary consideration.
The Hurricane Hotel in Tarifa is very much shabby chic without the chic – but has a hardcore of regulars that are seemingly heedless of the stench from the septic tank when the Poniente wind from the west, switches to the Levante from the open sewer that is the 21st Century Med. The rooms are…how shall I put this….quite basic, there is no TV (+) nor room service (-), and breakfast is a buffet from 8.00am – 11.00am. The staff vary from pleasant to hostile, and things change little, year on year. But I like it, and keep going, year after year.
Curiously amusing story about the Radisson Edwardian, Monix. Children do seem to get spoiled these days. One year, the villa my parents and their friends rented wasn’t quite big enough for all of us, so I ended up sleeping on a bathroom floor – girls don’t always get special privileges, Worm. Though we do like our creature comforts – and stylish hairdryers are always a plus, James – along with well stocked mini bars, though they don’t usually feature in budget hotels. Sounds like you prefer the more authentic touches, Mahlerman – I can recommend somewhere for you in Lusaka…
Further to my comment about men seeing hotels as ‘sleeping machines’, I note that Premier Inn have taken this idea too far.
I stayed in the Cardiff centre one last night, and they now have an automatated check-in process – a touch-screen job as per train tickets: put in your card, enter PIN and it prints out your key. Even cheaper than Lithuanians, I guess. This means that you can now visit a Premier Inn without having any human interaction whatsoever – though for now, as with M&S and their auto checkouts, there is one staff member standing by the bank of machines, helping middle-aged people to press the right buttons…