This totally serves me right for being a cheapskate - you get what you pay for after all. Nevertheless I feel the need to warn others - pay the extra tenner and stay at the Novotel!!

I was staying at this hotel for one night only whilst on a course down the road at the more expensive & exclusive Hilton.

I arrived about 6pm, and found that reception is in fact the bar in the restaurant. There were 2 staff in there eating their dinner, one of them came to check me in, the other one - think he was the chef - glared at me from his seat.

The hotel is more of a motel in that all the rooms open to the outside. I found my room and it took my about 5 minutes to get the door to open as the key was not of the norm.

The room was small and very cheaply decorated. It was freezing cold so I put on the heater - however I spent the whole time in my coat and woolly socks as the room didn't really heat up, and when I went to bed I put the extra blankets on the bed and was still not warm.

I thought a bath would warm me up, and after swilling a couple of hairs down the plughole I realised that the tap didn't want to work, so I had to fill the bath with the show head. There was some kind of extraction fan (it was on rather noisily for the duration of my stay) however it did nothing to stop the steam making everything slippy.

I finally got my bath - if you can call it that - the bath was just long enough to sit in bottom to toe, if you wanted to lounge you had to put your feet out and against the wall.

Maybe it was just my perception but I didn't feel safe in the room. A combination of the glaring member of staff, the inadequate key and hard to use deadlock, and the constant stream of people thumping past the door. I decided in the end to prop up a chair against the door handle! Extreme perhaps, but I felt a little safer.

The straw that broke the camels back was the --- noises coming from upstairs! Not the fault of the hotel perhaps, but lack of sound proofing if nothing else!!

My whole experience of this 'hotel' is negative. Cold, unrelaxed, lack of safety, hostile staff...

Never again! I have stayed in budget hotels before - and I often pay just £26 for the Travelodge - this wasn't just budget, it was CHEAP.