Future Inn, Cardiff Bay, Cardiff

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Great Room, Superb Location
Disadvantages:	None

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

As a birthday present I was given tickets to go and see Grease in the New Theatre in Cardiff so I thought we would make a weekend end of it and spend a few night in Cardiff. I had heard adverts for the Future Inn in Cardiff Bay when it first opened about 18 months ago and liked the sound of it, since then the Cardiff Bay area has expanded somewhat and as we like to stay out of city centres for the sake of tranquillity we booked two night there.

We booked through a 3rd party web site, so we got a 'standard' double room with breakfast included for £85 per room per night. The hotel is very easy to find, just follow the signs for Cardiff Bay and soon the 8 storey building comes into view along with amble car park, which in itself is an asset as city centre hotels don't have card parks of their own so it costs at least £10 per day to park in the nearest NCP.

Check in was handled quickly and efficiently, where we set up an account for the duration of our stay (so drinks etc could be charged to the room) and were given our electronic room keys so within 5 minutes we were in the shiny, metal talking lift heading for floor 4 (there are 6 floors of rooms) where our non smoking room was (in fact Future Inns have non-smoking floors to ensure that the area around the non-smoking rooms stay nice and fresh too - which is a nice touch).

The first thing we tried to do was to turn on the lights, however merely flicking the switch had no effect, in fact we could get none of the array of electrics in the room to work. I quick call to reception (which was quite quickly answered) got the problem resolved - right by the door is a slot into which one of the electronic room keys must be placed to effectively turn on the room power, I'm not quite sure why but I quite liked the novelty of it.

The room itself is quite large for a standard room and was tastefully decorated in cream, which makes a change to the peach that most hotel rooms seem to be decorated in. The bed, which was a Canadian sized (slightly larger) double has perfect all white linen and was the comfiest hotel bed I have ever slept in. We also had a two seat sofa, an arm chair and stool plus the desk and chair.

Now on the desk was a Sony 19 inch flat screen TV, which not only has the five normal terrestrial channels but has freeview so in total you get about 20 channels including ITV 2 and 3 as well as BBC 2 and 3 which is handy. The TV also acts as the interface to an entertainment centre so that you can play your own DVD's and CD's in the room and finally the cherry on top - internet access, yes through the TV you get free internet access which is really handy for looking things up on the web regarding the local. All of the TV's features are accessed through the remote control (and in the case of the internet the wireless compact keyboard) (There is also a Ethernet cable so that you can hook a laptop up to internet connection but there is a charge for this - £7 I think)

Other nice touches in the room are an ice bucket (which can be filled from the ice vending machine on the 1st floor) and two tumblers and two wine glasses (as often all you get are the 2 small glasses in the bathroom (we also had these).

This leads nicely on the bathroom. Again it is slightly larger than in many rooms and was slightly different in that the actual toilet was separated from the sink, bath and shower which again I thought was a nice touch. The shower itself was driven off the integrated bath taps and was easily adjustable for temperature and provided more than enough power to leave you feeling invigorated.

Now on to the food, the only meals we ate at the hotel was breakfast which was a buffer style help yourself. The cooked breakfast was much better than the continental with a never ending supply of bacon, sausage, fried and scrambled egg, beans, grilled tomatoes, hash browns, fried bread, fried potatoes and toast (both brown and white). Whereas the continental had some pastries, cornflakes, basic muesli or fruit to choose from. In terms of drinks there was tea, coffee and a wide range of juices (pineapple, orange, cranberry, tomato ….).

One thing to mention is that on the Sunday morning the hotel was busy, to such an extent that we had to wait for a table - not much of a wait , less than 10 minutes and the queue was managed by the staff to avoid any 'queue jumping' and that time soon went reading the complementary copies of the 'Independent' that are placed near the entrance to the restaurant.

Finally I must mention how superbly located the hotel is. As mentioned above it is a easy to drive to. Right outside the door is a 'Brewers Fayre' restaurant (Hemmingway's) where standard pub food is available at a reasonable price (although food and drink in the hotel restaurant is very reasonable too) and yards from that is a Pizza Express. Then less than 5 minutes walk away is the 'Red Dragon' centre, an entertainment complex containing all types of restaurants (American, Italian, Chinese), a bowling alley, cinema, nightclub and casino. Then if you walk through the centre and across the road you in Cardiff bay itself where you can walk around the bay, take in the impressive architecture of new Welsh Millennium Centre, the new National Assembly and many other lovely buildings plus here are even more very nice bars and restaurants from which you can stop and admire the view.

I really enjoyed my time at the Future Inn Cardiff Bay and hope to go back very soon, hopefully to see something in the Welsh Millennium Centre (and if I get to go anywhere else there's a Future Inn's it will be my first choice)