HotelChatter

Where Your Grandparents Will Stay: University Arms Hotel
The University Arms is part of the De Vere chain, a grand old 120-room Victorian building. It's the place where all grans and granddads stay when visiting their clever sons, and it's the place those sons all hold their wedding parties.

But again, be careful - you don't sleep on reputation.

The hotel is plush and dark-red velvety. The rooms have all your grandma's boxes ticked - soft carpets, old-fashioned bedspreads, big bathrooms and a trouser press for granddad.

But take your sunglasses for the colour-scheme. The hall and corridors hold  the biggest collection of insipid art you've ever not bothered to look at in your life. The bar and conference halls are huge, with leather studded chairs - and with silver-studded prices.

It sounds perfect for your grandparents - a real old English hotel. But there's something missing - atmosphere. Anyone who pays the starting rate of £145 ($290) for a standard double for one night and thinks they're getting a bargain here is on the wrong side of old age or above the line in business. And it feels it. They've overdone it on the decoration and it's unfortunately raw on service.

And location, location, location. You can't move grand old Victorian buildings, so this isn't the hotel's fault. But overlooking Parker's Piece is not the ideal place to stay, despite the website's claims. You're fairly close to town, it's true, but along a busy, noisy road. And the square of grass outside - Parker's Piece - is the latest spot for all-night parties by drunken foreign students.

Your gran and granddad are deaf, so they don't mind.

Where You Will Stay: The Hotel du Vin
Stay at the brand new, shiny, you-guessed-it French-style Hotel du Vin on the other side of town. Again, a five minute walk from the centre, but on a slightly nicer road.

The hotel only opened a few months ago, the newest baby in a mini-chain recently awarded Best UK Hotels Group by the Guardian newspaper. So no-one knows about it yet. But if they carry on like they've started, everyone soon will. It's already ranked no.1 in Cambridge on TripAdvisor.

It's in an old medieval building with a third of the rooms of the University Arms but three times more the atmosphere. They've kept the whitewashed walls and ceiling beams and put the bar down in the vaulted cellar. Added a library and wine-tasting room and kept the lighting low.

It works - partly because the mostly-foreign staff know how to make it work. Being deliberately English is an overrated pastime and not the way to get smooth service.

Go and get your grandparents and bring them here to dinner. The Hotel du Vin's quality fine-dining restaurant without the fine-dining prices knocks rowers' stockings off the University Arms' prickly Restaurant 17, which occasionally puts out tiny tables in the middle of the traffic-filled road. Okay, so the Hotel du Vin's chef is Irish, not French. But we don't need to take authenticity too far.

Prices start from £135 ($270) per double room per night.

[Photo 1: Nitot; Photo 2: Paulina 77]

Tags: Cambridge Hotels / Luxury Hotels / Boutique Hotels / UK Hotels / Monica Guy / Hotel Restaurants

by femmefatale