Happy New Year, and welcome to my minute slice of Ciao.
Happy New Year, and welcome to my minute slice of Ciao.
Member since:21.11.2000
Reviews:41
Members who trust:33
I genuinely used to get excited about going to stay in a hotel, don't ask me why? It probably stems back to my youth when hotels meant holidays and a little adventure.
Of course now I'm allegedly grown up it staying in hotels has become a little more mundane, and this is one adjective I would use to describe the Village Hotel and Leisure Club Swindon.
Village Hotel & Leisure Clubs are a chain of hotels across the country owned by the De Vere group, the chain that owns the rather famous Belfry. However I feel as though the one visited in Swindon is at the other end of the market.
I must apologise for being so negative so early on in this opinion, I stayed at this hotel for a period of 5 months continually, only going home at weekends, as I was working in Swindon at the time. It is true I was Alan Partridge for 5 months, or it certainly felt like such. Ahh…..hah! This hotel is very reminiscent of the set of the
Lynton Travel Lodge from the Alan Partridge second series.
The first problem was with the car park, there was never enough spaces due to the fact that the hotel is also a leisure club, so on arriving back at the hotel every evening at 7.00pm the leisure club was very busy and thus no parking spaces. However during my stay the hotel extended their car park, which helped, but it mean parking miles away from reception.
The leisure club is just one of the advertised facilities, this includes a gym with some free weights and quite a few machines, aerobic machines, two squash courts, and a 25m pool with sauna and Jacuzzi. Admittedly the leisure facilities are very good, they even offer keep fit classes, but in essence a hotel cannot rely on its leisure facilities alone
The leisure club has its own bar come café that serves light meals. Moving on, it is the food that was found to be a bane of this hotel, it has three areas for food the leisure bar, the pub and Salinger's restaurant, they are all contained within the same building.
The meals available in the pub include general pub food on the menu and a special's board normally containing two or three extra dishes, a soup and a dessert. The choice was not very varied, or maybe it just seemed that way after five months, microwaved lasagne does become rather tasteless and I think I even started to look like Cajun chicken. The soup always brought amusement due to the fact, no matter what description it was given it always tasted the same. Basically the bar area served what could be described as chips with everything, most main meals not costing more than £7.00.
Salinger's restaurant serves grill type meals, steak, chicken, fish with the addition of a salad bar and a choice of potatoes, the prices within the restaurant were more expensive ranging from £10-£15 for a main course, however the quality remained somewhat similar to the pub. Salinger's also serves up breakfast every morning from 7.00am-9.00am, this was included in the rate that my company was paying, but it isn't always offered. The breakfast choices were standard for hotel, fruit, yoghurt, cereals, cooked full English or smoked fish.
It was at breakfast that I got my first real taste of the quality of service at the hotel, orders were often forgotten or very late, which is not a great thing to happen at breakfast time when you are in a rush to get to work. This level of service became apparent in the evenings as well, some staff became very familiar with myself and colleagues without really being invited to do so. I believe the biggest problem with service came about because of the high turnover of staff, and the fact most staff were very young probably just out of school. After all I believe it is very easy to find a job in Swindon, and thus many low pay businesses end up with staff that don't really care.
Moving on to the accommodation that is housed in a separate building from the pub and reception area. The en-suite guestrooms are of a reasonable size and included either two single beds or double bed, some rooms are family rooms with bed-settees or interconnecting doors. Additionally each rooms also has a fridge, ironing board & iron, obligatory kettle with coffee and tea bags found on the desk area and lastly the 14" portable television or 20" in an executive room. Sky Sports Channels 1-3 were also provided as well as Sky Premiere movie channel. The rooms were generally quite clean, but it is fair to say tired and slightly old fashioned, although official reports state that it was last renovated in 1999. I also found some bathroom shower areas to be culturing black mould, but this was only in two rooms.
Additional Facts Location - South Marston, East of Swindon on the Oxford Road Unofficial Rating - 3 Stars Rack Rate - £85 per room per night (not including breakfast) Telephone - 01793 83-3700
Overall for a special corporate rate of £72 a night including breakfast, I don't believe it represents very good value for money. It is possible to get a cheaper deal especially on laterooms.com, if you dare. Although this hotel was fully booked a lot of the time, I cannot recommend it due to the price that was paid, and the levels of service that was received during my long stay here. Unfortunately I did not have a choice were I stayed as the accommodation was arranged prior to the beginning of the contract
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5 Months, good god, you poor bloke!... I have stayed at one of those hotels for a weekend which was ok but long enough, a good review, 'back of the net'!
flipflopgirl 05.12.2003 01:31
mmmm mould...nice... lol great op! isobel xx
webfoot 08.06.2003 19:22
from your description I would say you were ripped off.You should get a much better rate for a long term stay, even with w/e's away
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