Hilton Southampton, Southampton

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Great full breakfast the next morning
Disadvantages:	Bad customer service, lack of towels, no minibar, traffic noise

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

We had a formal dinner coming up in Southampton and so I’d been scouting around on the net looking for the best deals on a hotel for the night. I have to say I was more than surprised when the Hilton came top of the list on Expedia and Last Minute.com. The average price for a double room in most standard hotels in Southampton is around £80 per night. But for some unknown reason the Hilton was only £40! After a bit more research I decided to plump for this and make the most of it.

Booking

I can’t vouch for the official Hilton hotel site as I booked this trip through Expedia. However, I looked at the Hilton site to make sure we were getting the best bargain and it seemed pretty straightforward to use.

Location

I’d been to the Hilton in Southampton before, but never to stay, only for another dinner. Therefore I was quite aware that it was nowhere near the city centre. I guess this is part of the reason for their massive drop in price for the rooms (which are ordinarily also around £80 per night). The hotel is situated near the M3/M27 junction into Swaythling in Southampton. I did some research before hand and worked out that an average taxi bill to the city centre would cost us about £10 each way. This was still less than the amount we’d have had to have paid to stay in one of the lesser hotels in the centre.

Another bonus to booking at the Hilton was that full breakfast was included the next morning. I shall come on to this later in the review, but if you’re skimming this then I’ll tell you now that this was a real high point of our stay and a definite reason to book.

The Hilton has a car park and charges £3 per night. Initially I thought it was a bit cheeky to charge for parking, but then I discovered other friends were staying in hotels that charged far more for parking as they were in the city centre. I guess the nominal £3 stops people from parking there for the airport or using the hotel car park as a park-and-taxi. Either way, our car was safe for the whole of our stay and we found it relatively easy to find a parking space. However, this said, we did turn up very early and the spaces soon filled up around 4pm.

Our first impression was that there was quite a lot of traffic noise as the hotel was situated very close to the motorway, but as we were out for the evening we knew that we would be tired later and this noise wouldn’t be an issue for us. Inside the rooms we couldn’t hear the road noise at all, but then we were overlooking the garden, rather than the front of the hotel.

Checking in

Our experience of checking in at this hotel is part of the reason that I have decided to write this review. I found the customer service to be somewhat lacking from the moment we arrived at the check-in desk.

To start with everything was going okay as they had confirmation of our Expedia booking. I am always slightly worried about this when booking online. I still haven’t quite got used to receiving e-receipts for holiday bookings and therefore I turn up at hotel check-in desks with a huge wad of print-outs that consequently confuse the staff further. On this occasion I kept these hidden in my handbag (ready to pull out in case they questioned our booking) and calmly stated that we had a room booked and gave our name. I’m sure I always look a bit suspicious when I do this as it takes quite a big effort to keep all the booking receipts tucked away, and not to start trying to prove my right to the room – especially if I got it for a bargain price!

Well anyway, the man on reception first tried to speak to my boyfriend (even though the booking was in my name) and then said he would need to call housekeeping to see if our room was ready. I thought this was fair enough seeing as we had turned up 10 minutes early and we’d been informed on Hilton website that we could check in from 3pm. A quick call to housekeeping resulted in being told that there would be a 10 minute wait. Meaning that this would be 3pm when our room was ready, we decided not to unpack the car and went for a quick walk around the grounds.

The ‘grounds’ of the Hilton Southampton don’t really deserve the title. I would rather describe them as a car park and a small back garden with a disused pond. It was pleasant to be out of the car park and away from the road, but the gravel path lead us to a bridge that was covered in safety signs and was possibly closed (but we weren’t sure) and a rather unimpressive pond. Continuing along the path in the other direction lead us up behind the hotel below all the hotel room windows and round the air conditioning heat exchangers. Well, what do you expect from a hotel by a motorway? I suppose maybe I was getting my hopes up a bit high when I heard the receptionist’s suggestion to have a wander round the grounds, but it was a bit pants.

We returned to reception at 3.05pm and sat in the seating area next to the lobby. When the receptionist showed no signs of coming over, or indeed of even making eye contact, we decided to go and ask again if our room was ready. Another call to housekeeping confirmed that our room would be ready in another 10 minutes. This was slightly annoying as this was what we had been told the first time, but we duly went to sit in the bar area, deciding to forgo tea or a drink as 10 minutes wouldn’t be long enough to enjoy it. The bar area was comfortable and well maintained, despite looking a bit stuck in the 90s. It would have been a perfectly nice place to enjoy a drink, if that’s what we were there for.

So 10 minutes went by again and then 15, and then our receptionist completely disappeared and was replaced by a new woman. When a few minutes went past and she had made no acknowledgement that she knew we were waiting we decided to ask again about our room. By this time a small queue had built up at the reception desk and other guests who had turned up way after us had been told they could go to their rooms. When we reached the front of the queue the receptionist had no idea who we were and we had to show our booking card we had been given by the first man to explain which room we were waiting for. A short phone call to housekeeping later and we were told, you guessed it, that our room would be ready in 10 minutes. We subduedly took up our seats in the bar again and waited for the time to pass. This wasn’t exactly how we’d imagined our posh stay at the Hilton to work out for the first 40 minutes or so, but then maybe your room gets left until last when they know you booked through Expedia!

Another 10 minutes passed and eventually our original receptionist appeared again. We were standing by the counter again by this point as the steady flow of hotel guests was taking up both receptionists’ time and we didn’t want to wait for too much longer if we could help it! Eventually we reached the front of the queue again and were told after a quick call to housekeeping that our room was ready! We were finally handed our hotel room keycard and had to walk out of the hotel to get all our belongings from the car, which thankfully we hadn’t brought in with us yet.

The Room

The room, when we finally got in it, was actually pretty nice. After our stroll around the ‘grounds’ we managed to work out we’d spotted this room earlier and it was one of the ones we’d pointed out that we thought might be a nice one to have. It had a kind of mock-balcony wooden construction outside the window and was on the 1st floor, so it wasn’t overlooked by the garden.

The room was nicely furnished with a big double bed, bedside tables, a long dressing table/counter, a TV, a small table and two chairs, a corner dressing table/mirror with a hairdryer and a stool. None of the furniture was particularly new, but it was nicely cleaned and we had a kettle and selection of teas/coffees/biscuits to help ourselves to.

After putting the kettle on (always the first thing to do after a long journey) we checked out the bathroom and were rather annoyed to find that we had no towels. The only drying implements in the bathroom were a couple of small hand towels and the bath mat. This was slightly annoying as we wanted to get ready for our formal dinner and having a shower and washing my hair was a key part of this plan. We called reception to ask about the lack of towels and were told that housekeeping hadn’t reached our room yet. It seems that whatever the problem is, the Hilton staff were keen to pin it in housekeeping. This is all the more annoying as there isn’t really anyone you can complain to about this as the management of housekeeping rarely walk the hotel corridors. We were told that the towels would be with us in, that’s right, 10 minutes so we decided to have a nice cuppa, watch the telly and read the promotional brochures in the room on cruises that we couldn’t afford.

Of course the towels didn’t turn up and when I heard housekeeping in the hall an hour later I poked my head out to see if they had any towels that might be coming our way. We were told (by the medium of shouting from the other end of the corridor) that they were going the other way and would be back in 10 minutes. When the towels didn’t arrive again we called reception again to ask of their whereabouts and to book some taxis for later (which they did very well). About 20 minutes later I heard a knock at the room opposite ours and decided (after hearing repeated banging) to open up and see if there were any towels about. The member of staff knocking on the room opposite us was holding a couple of towels and he asked if we were after them – finally we had towels! However, by this point it was 5.30 and, with out taxi arriving at 6.15 there was no time for a shower and to curl my hair. I decided to forgo the shower and just do my hair. And it’s a good thing I did as our taxi turned up early at 6pm (which admittedly had nothing to do with the hotel) and, although he said he wouldn’t start the meter until 6.15, we felt rather rushed!

After the dinner we found the room to be very comfortable for the night and the shower the next morning was good. I was impressed that the freebie shower gel/shampoo/conditioner were from Crabtree and Evelyn and were really nice quality. It would have been nice if I’d been able to use them the night before though! The décor in the bathroom was a bit dated and there was some mould on the ceiling, but I think most hotel bathrooms are like this as hey get a lot of use. I think I’d rather the hotel spent their extra cash on freebie toiletries and posh teabags than on updating their bathrooms too often.

Another thing we discovered that didn’t affect us, but which might affect potential guests to the hotel was that the minibar and the dressing gowns had been removed or were missing from our room. I wonder if this was again the result of us getting a bargain room. We never use the minibar, but I think if you’d come to stay on business or on your own then that lack of it might be a bit annoying. There were also facilities on site such as a swimming pool and a steam room, but we didn’t have time to use these. These facilities seemed pretty family friendly from what we could tell as we could hear lots of kids about.

Breakfast included

However annoying the night before had been, this was al forgotten when we went for our full breakfast the next morning that was included with the price of our stay. We went down to the breakfast room at what was probably a peak time and didn’t have to wait too long before getting show to a table. The breakfast was all a buffet, but there were loads of staff around topping up the hot food and asking us if we wanted hot drinks. Everything there was included and we were impressed with the quality of the food.

Our choices at breakfast included full English breakfast, cereals or continental-style items like cheese, bread, toast and fruit. I was really hungry and managed to get through most of this and then kept craving more food. Everything I thought of they seemed to have – including water melon! Overall I was very impressed with breakfast and there wasn’t much queuing to get the food.

Overall

I don’t think we’d go to this hotel again based on the customer service we got on our first night. The breakfast the next morning made up for this a bit, but I think other hotels would do breakfasts just as nice. I can’t complain too much as we paid half as much as we would have done if we’d booked a room elsewhere, but I think I’d search long and hard to find a better deal at a hotel elsewhere before staying here again.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to check out the photos!

--EXTRA NOTE AS OF 10/4/09--

I sent a letter of complaint to the UK head office of the Hilton chain after this visit and have since been given a partial refund and a letter of apology, stating that they would talk to their housekeeping department at the Southampton branch.

©tac20