Comfort Inn, Leeds

...deliberating we decided on the Comfort Inn in Bishopsgate which is located pretty centrally within a stones throw of Leeds train station and the hustle and bustle of the main shopping areas too. The room was priced at £59 for bed and breakfast, which we felt was very reasonable and we decided to park our car at a friends house who lives just outside of the city centre and then get the bus into Leeds to save on parking fees. Another plus point of ...
...to the railway viaduct the Comfort Inn looks rather out of place in amongst the old man pubs and dirty looking buildings. In fact we almost walked past it as it just looked like a lobby rather than a hotel it was only the sign in the window that gave it away.

We entered the building through the double front door and found ourselves in a small lobby where the lift was located; we couldn't see any signs for a staircase so we dutifully ... more

Recently my fiancé and I went up to Leeds for the weekend. I had arranged to meet up with an old friend who I hadn't seen for a while. We arranged to travel up to Leeds on the Saturday morning and stay overnight in a hotel but we couldn't decide which one to stay in.

At the moment we are saving really hard for our wedding next year so we are cutting back when and where we can, this meant that we would need to find a reasonably priced hotel in Leeds where we could stay that wasn't going to break the bank. We started looking at the options and it appeared that most hotels which were reasonably priced had no available parking other than a nearby NCP which was going to cost us in the region of £20 to park overnight in. Whilst we understood that this is usually the case with most city centre hotels we didn't really want to spend out that much on one nights accommodation as once you add it to the price of the hotel rooms you start getting to the £80/£90 mark.

After much deliberating we decided on the Comfort Inn in Bishopsgate which is located pretty centrally within a stones throw of Leeds train station and the hustle and bustle of the main shopping areas too. The room was priced at £59 for bed and breakfast, which we felt was very reasonable and we decided to park our car at a friends house who lives just outside of the city centre and then get the bus into Leeds to save on parking fees. Another plus point of the hotel other than the location was the fact that they provided breakfast as most places only seemed to provide accommodation on a room only basis.

The journey was quite straightforward, having driven to Leeds on many occasions I found my way very easily and had no problems whatsoever. We arrived at my friend's house, parked up and caught the bus into the City Centre which dropped us off almost right at the station and it took us just a few minutes to walk to the hotel.

The hotel isn't in the best of areas - located close to the railway viaduct the Comfort Inn looks rather out of place in amongst the old man pubs and dirty looking buildings. In fact we almost walked past it as it just looked like a lobby rather than a hotel it was only the sign in the window that gave it away.

We entered the building through the double front door and found ourselves in a small lobby where the lift was located; we couldn't see any signs for a staircase so we dutifully jumped in the lift to make our way to the reception area. The first thing I noticed was that the lift smelt very strongly of tea tree oil which was rather odd, my fiancé also noticed the rather intoxicating smell - though not that you could've missed it really.

We arrived at the Reception area which was on the 2nd floor, the corridors of the hotel were like a maze and I would think it could be very easy to get lost in amongst them - especially if you were slightly inebriated! We were greeted by a friendly gentleman who gave us a key card each and explained how to get to our room, he told us that breakfast was at 8.30am - 10.30am and where the breakfast room was. We went off to get settled in our room and get ready to go out for the evening.

Our room was on the 2nd floor - room 416. It was a very large room with masses of space; the rooms looked as if the hotel was an old Victorian house which had been transformed into separate hotel rooms as the ceilings were so tall. The room itself was a fantastic size with a large double bed, two bedside tables, two dressing tables, a wardrobe, a television and a trouser press. There was a large bathroom with a lavatory, hand basin and a large bath with shower over the top. The decoration wasn't of a very high standard and some parts of the room looked slightly shabby - the carpet in the bedroom looked as if it could do with a couple deep clean and the curtains looked as if they needed a wash.

In the room there were tea and coffee making facilities - a kettle, cups, teabags, coffee, sugar and milk. We decided to have a nice cup of tea after the journey. The dressing table where the tea making facilities were stood had a strange sticky residue all over it, almost as if somebody had tried to clean it with something and had used the wrong thing on it. This rendered the table useless as you couldn't put anything down on it as it almost got stuck down on the surface of the table, I made the mistake of putting my mobile phone down on it before I realised and ended up with a sticky mess all over my new phone which I wasn't happy about.

Now I understand that not every room in a hotel has the best view but I think the view from this hotel was one of the worst ones I have ever had. Straight outside our window was the metal fire escape which also doubled up as the local birds home so it seems but I'll get back to that later.

When we were getting ready to go out for the evening my fiancé tried to press his trousers but gave up after about 20 minutes when the trouser press was about as warm as my hand, he probably would've had better luck using my hair straighteners on them. I had to switch off the alarm clock in the room as it was making an extremely strange buzzing noise and sounded as if it was going to burst into flames at any moment. However the television did work and so we watched a bit of TV whilst getting ready to go out.

We went into Leeds City Centre and met up with my friend and her boyfriend, had a lovely meal and then went to a local bar for a few drinks, at around 1am we made our way back to the Comfort Inn - me feeling slightly merry from the Mojitos I'd been drinking during the evening.

This weekend happened to be the weekend when the clocks went back and by time we had both got back to the hotel we were both feeling quite peckish and were looking forward to making the most of breakfast in the morning. We climbed into bed hoping for a nice nights sleep however we were disappointed as the bed was so uncomfortable that I think I would've slept better on a bed of nails! Also the hotel was so noisy - all throughout the night I could hear people coming in and shouting and making lots of noise which meant I ended up getting very little sleep whatsoever. When I did eventually manage to drop off around 6.30am I was then woken up at 7.15am by the man in the room directly above us singing "Oh what a beautiful morning" in full operatic style, I swear they could probably hear him in Australia he was singing that loud. That was the last straw I was not a happy bunny, I was tired and hungry and I wished I was in my own bed. Not only did we have all these noises to contend with but it seemed as if outside the window a whole flock of birds were all chattering to each other, tweeting and chirping and warbling away.

Eventually I dropped off again only for my mobile to wake me up at 9.30am for breakfast, I got up and said I was getting dressed but my fiancé convinced me that we hadn't put the clocks on our phones back so in actual fact it was only 8.30 so we put our trusty Nokia's back an hour and went back to sleep and then got up at what we thought was 9.40am to make our way to breakfast. Well you can guess what happened next…….we went down to breakfast only to be stopped by the friendly man on reception who asked where we were going "we're off to breakfast" we said with a smile on our face and rumble in our tummy's "breakfast has finished, it finished at 10.30" said the man "it's ten to eleven now" yes our mobiles had already reset themselves and we'd actually put them back another hour!!!! This was going from bad to worse.

Feeling rather fed up with my other half I then went to reception to see what time we had to check out, I was sure it was 11am but Dave had said it was 12noon. I was right we had to check out by 11am which gave us the grand total of 5 minutes to pack up all our stuff and get out of the room - all this with a hangover - fantastic!!!

Eventually we managed to get all our stuff packed up and checked out of the hotel but we were both really hungry so the next stop was to find somewhere to have breakfast. Our first point of call was to head straight to Weatherspoons as we know that they do a darn good breakfast for just a couple of pounds but it seemed that most of Leeds had decided to do the same thing as it was stupidly busy with a queue heading out of the door. We ended up taking sanctuary from the rain in Yates and ordered ourselves a gorgeous breakfast which certainly hit the spot and filled and empty cavern in our bellies.

Neither of us were very impressed with the Comfort Inn - the room even though it was very grand in size was extremely basic inside and personally I think the rooms at Travelodge's are much better in terms of appearance, cleanliness and décor. Admittedly it was our own fault that we weren't able to comment on the breakfast as we slept straight through it but if it is anything like the standard of the room it probably won't have been very good anyway.

I definitely don't think we will be bothering to check into this particular Comfort Inn again - or even for that fact maybe even any other Comfort Inn, especially not if they are all of this standard. We will be sticking to our trust Travelodge's in future I think!

I would award this hotel a rather poor 2 out of 5. The rooms look as if they could do with being refurbished and made to look slightly more modern, they look dated and dirty and need to be bought forward into the 21st Century. Maybe with a lick of paint and a darn good clean they would look much better. However I don't know how they would combat the noise problem inside the hotel it isn't very comfortable if you can't even sleep because it is so noisy! 

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