Over the
last few days on our travels we’ve stayed in three hotels: the Travelodge in Chichester,
the Park Inn at Heathrow, and most recently the Blubay Apartments in Gzira,
Malta. Now, the first two of these establishments are run by chains in the UK, and
the third has at least three sites in Gzira, and possibly more elsewhere in Malta.
So you’d think they’d know something about how to run a hotel.
Wrong.
On
checking in to the Travelodge, the receptionist told us his computer had just
crashed and he was waiting for it to reboot. OK, probably not much he could do
about it, but possibly there’s some way a back-up system could be in place? Who
knows. Whilst waiting, I thought I’d like a glass of water, but there were no
cups next to the dispenser in reception. “I’ll just go and get some” he said,
and duly did, but how hard is it to notice when the last one is used?
Arrival
in the room was uneventful (see below for why this is not a given), but there
was a strange piece of machinery in the room. This was the DIY aircon unit. You
had to (a) figure out that it was the aircon, (b) connect the extraction hose
to a hole in the wall, (c) switch on. We didn’t get past (a), frankly.
Invest
in wardrobes? Hell, no. We’ll just give you a cheap rail and some hangers.
Unlike
every hotel in the world, ever, there’s no hairdryer in the room. You have to
get one from reception.
The
shower, however, was the main event. Firstly, a shower curtain. Who uses shower
curtains in hotels these days? (But see below.) It was
mouldy, and dripped all over the floor. This is a thing that happens in
bathrooms, and most bathrooms in hotels are equipped to deal with this
eventuality by the installation of a drain. This was clearly too high a cost
for budget chain Travelodge, though. The bathroom remained a lake for the
duration of our morning. Other features of the shower included a soap dispenser
with no soap, but a cover which dropped off to reveal the filth inside.
 |
| Diseased interior of Travelodge "nope" dispenser. |
Park Inn
by Radisson, on the other hand, sounds like a far better standard than
Crapelodge. One of a large number of hotels servicing Heathrow Airport, when I
booked it on Hotels.com it promised “0.7 miles from Heathrow Airport”. This may
be technically true if you count the chain-link fence along the runway as
Heathrow Airport, but it is in fact a 20 minute bus ride to Terminal 5.
Nevertheless, one expects a better standard from Radisson.
Nope.
I’d prepaid
the room, so the check-in process should have been quick and easy. Instead,
they use it as a sales opportunity: “Would you like to upgrade to a room closer
to the elevators?” “Would you like to book a table at our restaurant?” “Would
you like…?” Shut the fuck up and let me get to my room, please. Turns out, the
room was the first one next to the lift anyway, so that was purely an attempted
money-extraction exercise.
Still,
the room was OK, right? Again, the concept of wardrobes seemed beyond them, and
the rail to hang your coats, trousers or jackets on was less than three feet
from the floor, so the bottoms dragged on the carpet. Let’s have a look in the bathroom, shall we? Yes, it’s big and
spacious – in fact, we’ve been given a disabled-friendly room, with emergency
cords scattered liberally about the place, and space to swing several cats both
in the room and the bathroom. But, once more, the dreaded shower curtain. The bathroom
was a wet room, but at least it had a drain, so only half of it turned into a
lake when I took a shower. Le sigh.
Five
days later, and we’re checking in to Blubay apartment hotel in Gzira, Malta. We
located the apartment easily enough, but it doesn’t have any parking. We were
fortunate to find a spot on the waterfront, and walked five minutes to reception, to check in.
First up, they hit you for a tourist tax of €1 per night
- a total of €7. I hand over
my card. “Sorry, we don’t accept card payments for less than €10”. They might want to work on this – it’s not very “Welcome to my
country!”, is it? We then brought the car round to the front of the hotel, to
unload our bags. Whilst I drove back around the block to try and find another
parking space, Nicola was led two streets away to a separate building, where
our apartment was. So what, exactly, was the point of unloading the car at the
hotel? We wheeled our suitcases along the narrow pavements, to find our
apartment.
These
apartments, apparently, are where they think they can fob people off with something
they hadn’t advertised on their shiny new website. Firstly, one of the
principal reasons I’d chosen Blubay was the pool…which was not in our building,
but the one we’d first checked into. Two streets away, you’ll remember. Other
things wrong with the apartment were:
Air con
didn’t work
Air con
remote had no back
No
batteries in the tv remote
European
plug on the toaster (Malta has British-style sockets)
Only one
drinking glass
Only one
seat for the café-style dining table
The saloon-style bathroom doors “locked” with an elastic hair band
No hook
or rail in the shower - so you had to shower singlehandedly
Telephone
didn’t work
Room
access keys didn’t work
No seal
on the fridge so it leaked water and frosted up
No
cooking utensils
 |
| Note the hi-tech lock system. |
Naturally,
we brought all this to the attention of reception. I’d’ve called them, but the
phone didn’t work! So we walked around, taking both remotes with us, and a
written list of our issues. The receptionist said that they’d be able to fix
most of these “tomorrow” but we said that we wanted to be in the building with
the pool. We were then advised to turn up at reception at 11:00 the following morning
and ask to be allocated a room in their building, "as a lot of people are checking out on Saturday".
We took
the precaution of turning up at 10:30, in case everyone else in our building
had the same idea (we’d bumped into an English couple in the lift and found we
weren’t the only ones unhappy with the accommodation), and explained all this
to a different receptionist, who, thankfully, took it all on board and promised
us a room. We went back to pack up our stuff, which would be carried over by
hotel staff, and enjoined to check in again after 2pm.
We took
ourselves off to Bugibba for the day, and returned late afternoon, to check in.
The room they’d allocated us looked like what they put on the website: about
three times the floor space of what they’d fobbed us off with earlier, a modern
bathroom with room to swing several cats, should we be so inclined, and access
to the pool.
But, BLOODY
HELL! Why can’t you do this in the first place?
Blimey!
ReplyDelete