Durley Dean

This hotel is completely awful! The room was tiny, dirty and stank, the staff was chatting all the time between them and was annoied when I whished to order something. When I saw that it had been inaugurated only a few years ago, I just couldn’t believe it. It looked like it had been operating for 50 years without ever beeing maintained.
zero stars!

I really wanted to give the Durley Dean 5 stars but I just couldn’t. Well I could but it would have felt a bit wrong. We stayed here with work and it did the job. If I was staying here for a weekend away with Hot Steve I’d have wanted something a bit nicer, fo sho.
Anyway. Parked in the public car park the other side of the roundabout, which charges between 8am and 10pm. We arrived about 7pm and £4 lasted me til 9am the next day. The reception staff were cheery and nice but the reception itself stank of cigarettes from people smoking outside. It was also pretty tired looking and I felt a bit deflated after our 5 hour drive. My room was along a labyrinth of corridors and up and down lots of little steps, and was clean and light if a little bit squished. There was a flat screen LCD telly on the wall and an iron and all that in the wardrobe — oaty biscuits with my tea tray too.
There were a couple of niggles though — the bedding smelt foisty. Like it needed a good airing, as if it’d been drying in a room shared with the deep fat fryers. Unpleasant it was. It was also scratchy and not very soft at all. Not as plush as the Premier Inn I stayed in last week by any measure of the imagination.
The other thing sounds really picky, and it is, but I think I’ve got a mild case of OCD because I didn’t like that one of the bedside lamps had a bulb out. So I rang reception and offered to bring the broken bulb down but they said ‘no no we’ll send someone up with one.’ So I waited. And waited. And 45 minutes later I gave up and went to bed. And then another 20 minutes later someone knocked at my door with a new bulb and I sheepishly let them in and apologised for being an anally retentive ninny and said thanks very much. Then 20 minutes later another knock at the door… ‘did I leave my keys in your room?’ No. You did not. It is quarter to midnight. Please go away.
Breakfast was fine — I had a continental but there was a full english buffet that looked ok. Not keen on the coffee vending machine thingies. There are only two and there was a coachload of holidaymakers from Germany in so there were hefty queues. But I got a free Independent newspaper so I was content enough.
Three stars for a three star hotel.