This is my second review of this hotel within the last few months and I thought it was worth posting because after staying there during the back end of last year, I have been made to stay here agin during the last week or two by a client that has an account here. I will not be staying again.
Again I would have to say that the place is generally very clean, well looked after and by and large the staff are helpful and courteous. However, there is more to staying in a hotel than that and in a lot of other areas the Jurys falls very far short of the sorts of service you would expect from a hotel that charges £180 a night as its standard rate:
(1) The bar meals - almost uniformly terrible. On my first night I went to the bar for a meal (against my better judgement as colleagues who had stayed here previously had very bad experiences with the food) ordered fish, chips & peas - the fish was clearly a frozen slab and was so over-cooked that it was borderline burnt. A colleague I was eating with asked for a small salad to accompany his meal and was met with a response that suggested that the catering staff had never heard of a salad. If I had paid £3.50 for the fish and chips in a chippy I would have been discgusted at the quality of the food, when I'm paying the best part of a tenner, it's unforgiveably bad. Its the sort of standard you'd expect from a greasy spoon roadside caravan, not a city centre hotel. Shocking.
(2) The breakfast - the school canteen style, grab a tray and serve yourself cattle run is bad enough. Approaching one of the staff and asking if any white toast was available and being given a flat NO! (not, I'm sorry we've run out of bread' or 'I'm sorry we don't serve white toast but we do have wholemeal'.... just 'NO!'). You might think that a piece of toast is not worth getitng worked up about, and you're probably right, but the surliness and unhelpfulness of the staff on top of what is already a pretty ghastly and unrelaxing breakfast experience is really not what any paying guest should expect.
(3) The shower - too low to stand in and only pumping out cold water. Great.
(4) The wash basin - try and bend down to wash your face and head-butt the shelf that sticks out right over the wash basin (that is situated at about knee height).
(5) Music in the public areas - I have no objection to music in bars, reception areas etc. but when the restaurant, reception and bar are all in the same open area and each of them has a different soundtrack playing simultaneously it is excruciating. Painful to have to listen to, impossible to hold a conversation over and likely to induce a migraine if you're there for too long. So much for a relaxing experience.
(6) If I heard one guest complain about how cold the rooms were I must have heard ten or so. I heard one guest say that he asked for two room keys so that he could leave one in the air-con control so that he could leave it switched on during the day to warm his room up. I heard another say she couldn't wait to leave and go home just to get warm again. The very cold rooms was the number one topic of conversation amongst even complete strangers in there. To be fair there is a manually controlled air-conditioning unit for each room - but even though there is a small instruction note next to the control pad, working out what steps you need to take to get it working to either warm or cool the room is a challenge too far.


(3 votes)






