NH Bingen, Bingen am Rhein > Reviews (1)

Where on Earth is Bingen?

Bingen am Rhine is a small town of about twenty five thousand inhabitants and is located about half an hour from Frankfurt airport. It’s quite cute in that German ‘Schloss and twee churches’ kind of way. It sits – as the name suggests – on the banks of the Rhine in a valley which marks the southern limit of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Rhine Gorge. If you were there to soak up the atmosphere of the vineyard-clad slopes of the Rheingau range that rises on the other side of the river, you might well have a lovely time. If you have to go for a big meeting that rarely achieves much at our German office just outside the town, it’s not quite such a lovely prospect. In the years since I joined the company I’d always managed to find excuses not to go to Bingen or have managed to get in and out without the sun going down on my visit. This time there was no escaping a stay and I went with a heavy heart and lots of damning comments about the nH hotel ringing in my ears.

Laura HATES the nH

My colleague Laura was particularly unflattering in her analysis of the hotel. It was, she claimed, an absolute nightmare and she was dreading a return. The last time the meeting had taken place in Bingen was in September during an unseasonably hot spell. Germany does a particularly unpleasant type of ‘hot’ – an energy-draining, hot, damp heat that doesn’t occur consistently enough to justify hotels fitting air conditioning. Opening the windows isn’t really an option because the nH Bingen sits right next to the town’s railway line and a busy road. The bigger problem is on the other side of the Rhine where a second railway line is used by extraordinarily long haulage trains which can roll past for five to ten minutes because they’re SO long. It’s hard to imagine when you see how far away the railway line is, with a massive river full of monster barges sailing quietly along, but despite a big wide river between the hotel and the trains, the hills that rise behind the line reflect all the noise straight back at the town. Fortunately it was cold enough that I didn’t need to sleep with the windows open so I didn’t mind the train noise too much – it would have been unbearable with open windows.

Three Cheers for Cheery Melanie

The reception area is one of faded grandeur and has the ugliest water feature I’ve seen in a long time. It looks like someone dumped an old metal boiler in the middle of the seating area. It was probably a very fancy hotel in its day and the designers made some very bold style-statements, most of which now look at best dated and at worst plain silly. It must have been quite an expensive place to build but it’s now desperately in need of a makeover.

Melanie the receptionist was the cheeriest I’ve met in a long time. She was very chatty, very chirpy, and happy to check the computer to see if I and my colleague were already in their database. I think I’m in the nH’s loyalty scheme – though if they knew some of the things I’ve said about their hotels over the years, I’d probably get drummed out of the club.

My colleague suggested that we pay when we checked in so that we wouldn’t be delayed in leaving the next morning – this turned out to be a great idea for reasons that will become more obvious later in the review.

Room for Improvement

We headed up to the second floor and I was quite impressed to see that the wide corridor running along the front of the hotel meant the rooms would be insulated somewhat from the sound of the railway line that ran nearby. I opened the door, stepped into my room, gasped and then burst out laughing. The room was seriously weird and memorable for so many reasons that I’m sure the hotel won’t thank me for reporting. The most odd thing is that the bed was placed at 45 degrees to the room, running diagonally across the space. I’m not sure if this arrangement MADE the room seem smaller or if it was done BECAUSE the room was smaller than normal. The next weird thing was the bizarre bright green unit surrounding the bed with a tinted mirror above the bed and strange bedside tables all running into one unit. Rather odd brass lamps stuck out from these bedside units to illuminate the bed. The effect was one that fits my imaginary mental picture of a cheap Japanese ‘love hotel’. The colour of the wood (or mock wood possibly) was a lurid bright green. When I commented to a colleague that the colour was weird, she said that it used to be bright pink and once I knew that, I could see this was green with a ‘hint’ of Barbie pink shining through. When the lights were out I was OK in the bed because I could forget it was crooked and the room was garish but when the lights were on I just felt completely ‘wrong’ and disoriented. I’d spent the previous three nights in a hotel in Bremen where the bed was much too soft and had given me back ache so I could forgive the ugliness of the nH bed because it was at least a lot more comfortable.

No No! Not the (un)comfy chair!

The nH hotel chain in Germany has a ‘signature’ chair – a rather ugly black leather thing that throws the user into an angle not unlike a deckchair. It comes with a footstool and the last three German nH hotels that I’ve stayed in all had this same design of chair. It is horribly uncomfortable and good for nothing – you’re too reclined to read or even to watch the television and in a room as small as the one in Bingen, it just represented one more thing to bump into when shuffling round the room.

There was a strangely shaped desk in the same green wood on which stood a small flat screen television. I didn’t turn it on but I rather doubt there’d be anything worth watching in English. My window looked out towards the river so I appreciated a ‘river view’ but it was interrupted with quite a few buildings in between me and the water. There was a strange storage unit with a hanging rail and some cupboards concealing the mini-bar and some drawers. Surprisingly – since they are very rare outside the UK – there was a large trouser press. Unfortunately there was no suitcase stand so my suitcase took up most of the desk.

Given that the woodwork is so scary, it’s a good thing that the room had painted white walls and a finely striped carpet which crept up part of one wall to the height of the dado rail. The curtains were arranged in a strange inside-out set up that meant I had to fight through the silvery grey sheers to get to the blackout curtains beyond.

The bathroom was very dated and old but not in a particularly awful way. The floor tiling was a rather ugly flesh colour but luckily the wall tiles were dull rather than being too loud. There was a small bath with a shower over and there was plenty of hot water.

Breakfast and the story about the lift

Breakfast the next morning was ok but nothing special although the breakfast room has lovely views out over the river which I enjoyed. The food choices were very standard and nothing to get excited about. We had to leave quite early so I had taken my suitcase down with me for breakfast which – along with having prepaid for our rooms - turned out to be a wise decision. A Portuguese colleague had got himself trapped in the hotel lift and couldn’t get out. Apparently he rang reception from his mobile and they asked where he was "I'm in the lift of course". "No", the asked "Which floor are you on?" He wasn't impressed - how could he tell when he was stuck inside.

As a result of this problem, for some oddly connected reason the receptionist couldn’t check anyone out. Apparently she'd been working on her Girl Guide 'lift rescue' badge for some time so she was pretty calm and unflustered but couldn't do lift rescue AND check outs at the same time. Consequently half our group couldn’t leave for work until the hotel worked out how to get him out of the lift so they could pay. I know it’s cruel to say it but I thought it was pretty funny.

Recommendation

The cost of a night at the nH was just over 70 euros which I thought was pretty good value. It’s an adequate hotel that’s definitely perfect for those who are both deaf and colour-blind. The rest of us should probably avoid staying there when it’s hot and wearing sunglasses in your room might not be a bad idea. Wikipedia told me that the population of Bingen has been stable for many years - clearly I'm not the only one who doesn't think the pretty scenery is enough to compensate for the noise of the freight trains.

In giving this three stars I’m acknowledging that it wasn’t all bad. The rooms have a degree of ugliness which borders on being funny rather than offensive and the railway noise is probably a problem to every hotel in the town and just a nasty factor of the location and acoustics. On the plus side the bed was comfortable and the receptionist deserves a pay rise for impressing us all so much.