Better than that Michelin star rubbish

I’ve stayed in some pretty ropey hotels in my time. Without doubt the worst was a place called La Playa Honda in Tenerife. It was a budget hotel that I stayed in while I was getting my scuba diving qualification back in 2001.

Having spent what little money I had back then on flights and the PADI course itself, there was little choice but to stay in the cheapest hotel going. Unfortunately, on checking into the room I soon discovered that my mate had booked a room with only 2 single beds. This was a bit of a problem because there were 3 of us. And we were all blokes. Now, being barely 20 at the time I was used to sleeping on the sofa or on the floor because that’s what I did most weekends at parties so doing it in a hotel didn’t seem like a problem. Therefore I volunteered to take the sofa.

The first thing I always do when I check into a hotel is condemn the toilet. It’s tradition. So after being such a pleasant soul in allowing the others to have the bedrooms, I then went and did something rather unpleasant in the toilet. This was where the holiday took its first turn for the worst. You see normally when one flushes a toilet, the resultant waste disappears round the U-Bend and ends up in the Atlantic. Not being at all fazed by the fact that I would be diving in that very sea the next day, I pulled the flusher only to discover to my horror that everything flushed straight out of the bottom and across the floor. It transpired that the toilet wasn’t plumbed. Nor was it even fixed to the floor.

The place itself was messy, smelly and generally unpleasant. The sofa I had volunteered to sleep on was hideously uncomfortable and itchy. It also had a horrible texture. I kept waking up in the night convinced I was sleeping next to a big, fat, hairy dyke. Even worse was when I woke up one morning and found myself staring into the menacing eyes of a 2 foot long cockroach that had decided to camp on my bedding. This, needless to say, nearly made me deposit more bodily waste on the floor than the malfunctioning toilet. As any normal human does when they are scared half to death by a creepy crawly, I felt the urge to kill it.

Have you ever tried to kill a cockroach? I can tell you it’s impossible, especially when they are the size of my fist. I must have spent 3 hours stamping on the little bastard and the thing didn’t even flinch. I swear I even heard it laughing at me.

Nevertheless, I did return to the Island several times after that to go diving. Although I tended to stay in nice hotels thereafter, my experience with Place de la Cockroach didn’t put me off budget hotels entirely. Sure, if I go away for a romantic weekend with my better half, I will book a posh hotel but if I’m just going away and need a roof over my head, a budget hotel is the way to go.

My racing has taken me across the channel to places like Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium and Le Mans in France. Apart from one awful stay in a posh bed and breakfast in the south of France, which was run by the French equivalent of Basil Faulty, I’ve always stayed in budget hotels. Despite racing with Galliard, who have ties with the up-market Radisson Empire, their “special deal” for a hotel in Spa would still have cost more than my mortgage.

Now, Spa is notoriously expensive. However, there is one hotel right in the centre of town that apparently no one else has ever heard of. It’s called the Hotel Cardinal and I’ve never seen more than 2 other people in there. Not only is it exceptionally cheap given its location, it is also very pleasant. The rooms are nice, the décor is nice, the food is nice and it has a really good ambiance. It’s better, in my opinion, than some hotels with more stars.

Of course when I stay at places like Le Mans and other ghastly circuits in France, I’ve often gone for the Campanille hotels, which are the French equivalent of a Travelodge. Sure this is also where sexually frustrated businessmen go to slip something inside their secretary or a prostitute, but they are cheap and do their job; they provide an adequately comfortable bed and put a solid roof over one’s head.

My racing also takes me to various locations across this great land. Places like Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Northamptonshire, Kent, Suffolk, Dorset and Wales to name but a few. Travelodge has always been my first port of call. The rooms were always clean and well turned out, they had a television and the beds were comfortable enough to sleep in. What more could one ask for?

However, lately they have started to get a bit tired. The televisions only have 3 working channels, the shower is more like a dribble, the kettle takes a week to boil and most of the rooms have started to smell like someone from Basildon. Annoyingly they have started to only ever supply one towel even when I book a twin room where there is obviously going to be more than one person staying there.

Deciding that £50 per night was a bit steep for this, I decided to try one of these Premier Inn places. They look exactly the same except the colour scheme is purple and yellow as opposed to blue and white, and they are promoted by Lenny Henry rather than a gangster teddy bear.

They are so much better. If anything they are even cheaper than Travelodge and most of them have their own Beefeater restaurants, which are much more appropriate for middle-class snobs like me than the Little Chef’s that usually accompany a Travelodge. The showers actually work, they have nice, hygienic soap dispensers, they all have modern flat screen TV’s with freeview and the staff are a lot friendlier too. I also like the fact that I can have breakfast in the restaurant. I never trusted the doggy bags that Travelodge offered to stick outside the bedroom door.

Anyway, despite the fact that I can now have a proper shower and remove all the oil and petrol fumes from my face after a race and I can have a nice meal and an alcoholic beverage in a decent restaurant, I have one complaint: Some of their rooms have a painting of 3 purple trees type objects with reflections and a fourth in the reflection with nothing above it. Well, having spent the evening in the restaurant and getting through 2 bottles of red wine and several beers, I then spent several hours having a drunken argument with my dad about the hidden meaning and symbolism behind this picture when I should have been getting a good night’s sleep in preparation for a race the next day.

I therefore request that Premier Inn remove these paintings because it now appears I have become a hotel critic and an art critic.