Arena House

Very close to the city centre and the train station. Clean, convenient, cheap.

No power sockets in the room, I chardeg my phone in pubs.

Grim and cheerless. This hotel is intended only to extract profit from guests – there is no interest in their comfort or in whether they have a pleasant stay. I was there as part of a group, paying £59.95 per room, and there were no staff on site, so nobody to go to when the sheets were dirty, there were hairs in the beds, bedside lights and TVs didn’t work, blinds were broken and there was a wet patch on the floor of one of the rooms. The only phone number given is an 0870 number, “for emergencies only”, with no info given about how much calls to the number cost; calls to 0870 numbers can cost 71p per minute. Blinds are thin and the windows don't keep out the music from the nearby bar, which luckily only went on till 1 am. There are a generous four power points in the rooms, but they are hidden near floor level behind the desk. The vending machine is old and doesn't take modern £1 coins. There is a shared kitchen, with minimal crockery and saucepans and no separate recycling bins, so the general waste bin is full of things that could be recycled. Adequate as a last resort but avoid if at all possible.

Absolutely nothing

The smell was the first thing to be hit with. The mattress was a flimsy bunch of springs. The sheets were covered in hair. The duvet was manky and stained. The pillows were awful. The kitchen was smelly,dirty and grimy. The shared bathroom was mouldy and smelly. I had booked two nights but only stayed a few hours.