Jurys Inn Croydon, London

Having attended a conference here before in one of the conference suites, and having stayed overnight at the hotel a few month's ago, I felt it was time to post a review of the Inn on Ciao.

Jury's Inn Croydon is situated on the A212, Wellesley Road in central Croydon. This is one of the busiest roads in the borough and the hotel is only about a ten minute walk from mainline East Croydon station and the smaller West Croydon station. There are numerous buses that stop virtually right outside the hotel, which serve south London, as well as several tramstops nearby making it easily accessible to Wimbledon, amongst other places.

The hotel is only a few years old, and the exterior of the building is clean and modern. There are about 8 or 9 floors of bedrooms in this hotel, with the first floor being given over to conference suites. When you enter, the reception is to the rear of the lobby, with a small seating area for relaxing to your right. My first impression was of a clean, smart hotel with a nice marble floor. There are also large, probably marble, columns dotted around the lobby, which I presume were for decoration only. I noticed the hotel bar before approaching reception but it was closed, as was the restaurant to the right. The large windows in the restaurant made it look light and airy although it faces the busy Lansdowne Road and all you can see was traffic queuing at the lights to enter Wellesley Road and office workers in their lunch hour. Not very exciting. The staff manning the reception desks were both immaculately dressed, and the receptionist who served us booked us in, gave us our door passes and pointed us in the direction of the lifts.

For those of you not familiar, central Croydon has a few large car parks which are well located for the Whitgift shopping centre which is just over the road from this hotel. The only drawback is that they are expensive if you are staying overnight. Although this hotel is fairly large, with about 240 bedrooms, there is no parking on site. This means that for those arriving by car, you will have to walk from one of the two main car parks across the Wellesley Road to here via the underpass. This is not a very pleasant experience at the best of times, and I certainly wouldn't want that hassle after dark, with luggage in tow. Also, a word of advice if you do use the underpass: hold your breath, it ain't very nice…

To reiterate, there are over 240 bedrooms, probably all identical, although I only saw my one. There were the standard amenities, being a hairdryer, a satellite television and small kettle. The bed was a large kingsize, I would say, with fresh white linen sheets. The carpet was a dark pink colour, not to my taste but it made the room look warm and cosy. Overall, the room looked clean and the carpet looked freshly hoovered. Although the room faced out onto the dual carriageway, there was no real noise with the window shut. This might have been helped by the fact that we were on the sixth floor. There was the usual desk and chair in the room, also a smaller chair in the corner.

There was also a notice asking that if you want the towels changing to leave them on the floor, to reduce the amount of washing they have to do. This is pretty standard I think these days.

There is the Innfusion Restaurant and the bar which I mentioned before, together with a little coffee bar. Not having used any of these, I'm afraid I can't really comment.

Thanks for reading.