Best Western Richmond BC, Vancouver

...pieces on Canadian Affair (very cheap travel agent for flights from the UK) and Thomas Cook Airlines, who I flew with. Reviews for Richmond BC and Vancouver coming up. These will include more information on what you could do while you stay at the Best Western!
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This was an excellent hotel! It’s not the poshest I’ve stayed in terms of how it looks, but it has excellent facilities and is all round a great place to stay. They were chosen "Best Hotel in Richmond" as well as "Best Brunch" by Richmond News readers for 2003. I stayed there for just over a week in September 2003 while I attended a convention for the show Stargate SG-1. And I’ll be back again this summer! It’s also fairly convenient for Vancouver and the surrounding area if you’d rather not stay downtown.

Facilities include a shop with some lovely souvenirs, an Internet café, hair salon and an exercise room with saunas (and a washing machine which I only discovered after I’d lugged my bags several blocks to the local laundrette!). There is a pool and Jacuzzi in the courtyard but they are small. Reception can also fix you up with a safety deposit box (which I used and found quite convenient) and lots of leaflets for the tourist! The hotel is clean, and a newspaper is delivered to your door every day. The hotel also has full conference facilities, and is close to local amenities such as a shopping centre and a cinema.

They provide a free shuttle to and from the airport. I arrived with a party and they were able to arrange to send two. If you want to use public transport to Vancouver it’s about a 5 minute walk to where the bus stops. From there the journey takes about 30 minutes. (That seems short to someone who lives in London!)

My standard king-bedded room cost me $125 CAD not including taxes of around 15%. This was high season, so you’d get it a lot cheaper in the winter. It was huge by UK standards. You could have slept 3-5 people in the bed, and the room as a whole had acres of space. There was also a big TV, desk area, separate seating area and a small balcony. Coming from the UK I did find having the coffee maker in the bathroom a little weird! But that was large too.

I also saw another room with twin beds plus ‘cot’ for a third person to sleep on. That did look more crowded with all that in, though still reasonable. I think the rooms in some wings are smaller than others (I was in West I think). I heard the ‘cots’, which were actually chairs that pulled out into a narrow single bed, were not that comfortable. My wing included the Turtle Bar on the ground floor, but I didn’t have a problem with noise. I had a room several floors up and at the end of the corridor, plus they close quite early. Tips: don’t let them give you a courtyard room. They are more likely to be noisy, and if they are on the ground floor anyone in the courtyard can come stare in your windows! And though their advertising doesn’t say, some of the standard rooms do have a fridge. I was able to request one to store medication. It turned out to be full sized and very useful for food as well!

Catering: There’s a couple of restaurants which I didn’t use myself. I did however use the Thirsty Turtle bar in the evenings. They do a bar menu with very generous portions. Prices were less than you’d expect in the UK. The hotel also catered for a couple of parties at my convention. They did a nice range of buffet foods: sliced meats, breaded prawns, sausage rolls, fruit slices, meatballs. I did have a problem with the meatballs though. I did ask but the member of staff concerned didn’t know and it turned out they had mushroom gravy… I’m mildly allergic to mushroom so that caused me some discomfort. (I’d dock them half a star for that…)

Staff are friendly and helpful. I lost a screw from my glasses and had tied the joint together with dental floss. One of the staff noticed (I didn’t ask) and was falling over himself to find a screw in lost property for me. (That’s the half star given back for going beyond the call of duty…) They also set up a table complete with tablecloths free of charge for me to advertise a sponsored hike I was doing a few days later. I thought this was great since that was actually the day I moved to a Downtown hotel and was checking out!

Conference facilities include a good range of different rooms. They are all in one wing on the ground floor alongside the car park (so smokers can nip outside quickly!). Plenty of toilets and they provide stuff like a bar and catering.

Accessibility: It’s actually spread out over three wings, plus a fourth for the conference facilities, so you do have to walk a fair distance to get from your room to the conference rooms for example. The upside of this is that all the main facilities are on a level ground floor making it very accessible. There’s lifts to all floors and they do have accessible rooms.

Clientele when I was there was a mix. There were six hundred Stargate fans of course… Since they’ve got great conference facilities I think you could expect a lot of business travellers. Air crew also stay there which I think is usually considered a good sign! It’s perhaps not a hotel for kids, since the pool is small and they don’t have family rooms as such. Possibly families with older kids would find it comfortable as a stopping off place to recover from a flight before travelling on. They do allow pets.

If you want to know more, their website is at: http://www.richmondinn.com

This is one of a series of reviews I’m writing about my trip to Canada. I’ve already written pieces on Canadian Affair (very cheap travel agent for flights from the UK) and Thomas Cook Airlines, who I flew with. Reviews for Richmond BC and Vancouver coming up. These will include more information on what you could do while you stay at the Best Western!
 

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