I travel a LOT for work & I've stayed in a lot of hotels and in particular a lot of Holday Inn's, this one I did not like.
Obviously it's a standard hotel, it is an express hotel & you sort of had to expect that coming to it. I will say that the hotel was spotless! Now for the list of things I didn't like:
I didn't like the breakfast. Your options were some sort of strange flavoured sausage, eggs, bacon, pastries, fruit salad from a tin, a handful of cereals or toast. As someone who has certain food intolerances breakfast is often my least favourite meal when I'm away from home. In general there's often some whole fruits I can take to make up for it, in this place the whole fruits were Banana's & they were all gone by day 2.
The hotel was grossly understaffed & the staff that were there were so ridiculously slow they didn't really do much to help each other out. There were more than 50 of us here in a group (including 27 children) & another gang of Scottish men. As the bar was behind the same counter as the reception desk you were often left standing an age for someone to leave the bar & come serve you at reception or vice versa. And for some reason the hotel room keys kept deactivating (everyone's did) so we spent a lot of time waiting at reception. There was one occasion where two families arrived at the bar at 8:45pm to order food. Because they had to wait so long for service one of the families was told it was too late to order food despite the other family having just been served in front of them.
The hotel staff (or certainly one guy in particular) was incredibly rude when under pressure. In general our group were really nice to them and although we understand being under pressure is not nice, there's just absolutely no need for rudeness - I actually had an full blown argument with the guy for overcharging me for a drink & then leaving me short on the change... Full blown row to resolve the issue despite him clearly being in the wrong! Extremely unprofessional!
They actually ran out of alcohol 3 nights into our stay, not because we drank a lot, we were there for a competition so no real drinking was done until the last night.
Not giving one star because as I noted the hotel was clean & completely liveable. Just wouldn't be my first choice of hotel. read more