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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.