HotelChatter

2012 Olympics Hotels / London Hotels / Dorset Hotels / England Hotels / English Hotels / Hotel News / → All Tags

More Olympics Hotel Drama in England, This Time in Dorset

With just over 200 days left until the 2012 Olympics in London, preparations for the Games have officially shifted into hyperdrive. The city anticipates the arrival of 25,000 athletes and a flood of tourists, and local hotels are bracing themselves for the inundation.

But even hotels in surrounding cities are fretting over the Olympics, albeit for a different reason. Quieter counties that typically attract scenic scenery-seeking out-of-towners during summertime fear that seasonal regulars will be "put off" by the Games. No doubt they, much like native Londoners, will find themselves overcome by the urge to retreat in the face of buzzy tourists. (Watch out, they're armed with fanny packs.)

more ›

Hotel Services / English Hotels / Hotel Deals / → All Tags

Hit The Beach (Hut) at Hotel Du Vin Brighton

Where: Ship Street, Brighton, United Kingdom, BN1 1AD

As the song goes, we do like to be beside the seaside. What we don’t like is sharing the seaside with the thousands of others who like it too. Especially when everyone’s had the same idea to jump on a train in London and hit up the coast at Brighton, as happens every time the sun comes out.

To make things a little less messy, Hotel du Vin down there is putting its Victorian beach hut up for rent. It’s about two and a half miles from the hotel, on the beach at Hove rather than bang in Brighton (but then, there’s not room for a bottle of sun tan lotion on the beach at Brighton when it’s summer, so that’s a good thing).

It used to be available to guests staying in the hotel suites, but they never used it (those suites are that nice, see) – so this year the hotel has given it a complete refurb and opened it up to the plebs. By which we mean everyone – you don’t even have to be staying there to rent it.

You have to book in advance, obviously, and it’s not cheap – a day’s hire costs from £45 per person. But that £45 does include a food hamper (a picnic basket), wine, bikes and the knowledge that you can retreat from the hoi polloi into your own little bunker at any point. And that, in Brighton, is pretty precious. It also comes stocked with cricket bats, beach balls, badminton racquets, deckchairs and parasols, which can double as umbrellas should the weather turn British.

If you want to make a night of it, HdV itself has (proper) rooms from £170, excluding breakfast.

Eco-Hotels / Green Hotels / English Hotels / → All Tags

Green Spaces Search Finds Old Leake's Eco-Lodge

Where: Station Rd, Old Leake, United Kingdom, PE22 9RF

The UK Times are spending the next few months gathering nominations from the public for their Green Spaces Travel awards: that is, the most environmentally friendly places to stay that have helped to change your attitude to be more green.

One of the first nominations to come in is for the Eco-Lodge in Old Leake, Lincolnshire. We've long been amazed by this place and its founder Andy Reynolds, who's come up with all kinds of creative solutions to keep the lodge as environmentally sound as possible, and who's not afraid to try to teach the rest of us a thing or two, at the same time.

As the nominating guest said, the Eco-Lodge is not the kind of place where they think they're green just because they suggest you shouldn't get your towels washed every day. Instead, you use homemade charcoal to cook homegrown veges and local organic meat. A shed full of old forklift batteries have been converted to store energy generated by a rusty old windmill Andy resurrected from scrap.

Eco-Lodge doesn't sound like the most comfortable place to stay, but it has to win some prize as one of the greenest. We'll be following the Times to see if a few more comfortable yet nearly-as-green places get nominated for the Green Spaces Travel awards.

[Photo: Windsors Child]

English Hotels / Country Hotels / International Hotel WiFi / → All Tags

The Residence in Bath Is Almost Like Home

Where: Weston Road, Bath , United Kingdom, BA1 2XZ

Simply called The Residence, there's a hotel in Bath, England, that seems to hark back to Jane Austen days of exclusive clubs and high society--except that if we've got the cash, we can stay there too. There are just six rooms for guests but they are part of a larger complex inside an old Georgian house, with a restaurant, bar and gardens also accessible to members of the private club.

Recent guests at TripAdvisor can't speak highly enough of The Residence, with everyone loving the luxurious rooms and a few mentioning the "adults only" drawer, too! But a UK Telegraph review over the weekend was not quite as over-the-top impressed, citing short showers, erratic bar service and inadequate reading lights in bed--but it sounds like they might be a bit on the fussy side.

more ›

UK Hotels / English Hotels / Seaside Hotels / Monica Guy / Bournemouth / → All Tags

Buckets & Spades at the Captain's Club in Christchurch

Where: Ferry Lane, Christchurch, Dorset, United Kingdom, BH23 1HU

Lesson Three in Understanding the English: not only do we love trains, antiques, animals and eccentric pubs, we go crazy over seaside holidays.

Blackpool if we've got kids, Bournemouth if we're over 60, Butlins if the weather's being English and we want to stay indoors and pretend we're at the seaside.

The sazzy HotelChatter choice of English seaside hotels is the Captain's Club Hotel in the teensy south coast town of Christchurch, Dorset.

more ›

English Hotels / UK Hotels / Stonehenge Hotels / Zoo Hotels / → All Tags

England's Safari Park & Pub: The Bath Arms at Longleat

Where: Longleat Estate, Horningsham, Warminster, Wiltshire, United Kingdom, BA12 7LY

Lesson 2 in Understanding the English: not only do we love trains and antiques, we go loopy over animals and eccentric English pubs.

The Bath Arms combines the two - it's a quirky variation on an old English pub with a safari park on its doorstep.

The Bath Arms describes itself as a 'boutique hotel' but if recent reviews are anything to go by it's more bucket than boutique, with slightly scruffy facilities and a ham'n'eggs restaurant. That said, the novelty factor of an English pub with a Karma Sutra room (oo-er) is worth a bit of discomfort.

more ›

Luxury Hotels / Country Hotels / English Hotels / Monica Guy / → All Tags

Quintessential Englishness: The Bath Priory

Where: Weston Road, Bath, United Kingdom, BA1 2XT

Monica Guy is fed up with the old guard hotels of the U.K. that may have entertained her grandparents when they were tripping all over the world in their youth but have since been lasting on reputation and little else. In this new feature, she pits her grandma's favorite hotel against some of the new hip hotels popping up across the rainy motherland. Enjoy.

So you'd won in Oxford and won in Cambridge - your slick boutique hotels were a hundred times smoother than gran and granddad's choice. Proves you can't sleep on a bed of reputation.

But your grandparents excelled themselves in Bath with the much discussed (in upper-class circles) Bath Priory. The quintessential hotel image of Englishness in a hotel that's worth its reputation.

Bath is a beautiful University city in the west of England, with hills as steep as the sides of houses and a newly opened working reconstruction of the healing Roman baths after which the city's named. It's increasingly on the tourist trail as visitors venture further and further out from London.

But Bath is as old as, well, the Romans, and there isn't much room for shiny new buildings. Hotels - anything from mangy tourist pickups to stylish boutique hotels such as the Queensbury hide behind Victorian, Edwardian or even Gothic façades and you've got little chance of knowing what you're in for.

more ›