Colin A
My wife and I were looking for somewhere to stay when we were attending the Welshpool 1940’s Weekend, so I booked this hotel through Expedia on a bed and breakfast basis for four nights at what I thought was a very reasonable rate of £340 for our total stay. ||On arrival I easily got parked as there is plenty of free parking around the hotel, and we used the car countless times during our four night stay and never had any problems finding a space on our return.||The hotel is in a beautiful village, and its black and white timbered exterior gave it a real charm, and this continues into the interior of the building.||The pleasant member of staff that attended to us on our arrival made booking in easy, and we were shown to our room within no time at all, with a few important things explained on the way. ||We were pleasantly surprised at how large the room was, as I guess, due to how old the hotel was, we were expecting a small, low ceilinged space, but this looked to be a great place to call home for the next four nights. The room looked to be in a great state of decoration and also looked immaculate, but we found a bra and panties in the top dresser drawer (see photo). The extractor fan in the en-suite was dirty (see photo), and the air intake on the hair dryer was also dirty (see photo), so a lack of attention to detail by housekeeping, but don’t let this put you off as the remainder of the room was clean. ||As stated the room was massive, with almost everything we required for our stay (small flat screen TV, which was perfectly adequate (it had a good picture, with no pixilation, and also catch up TV as well, although we had a few problems with this which I put down to the WiFi, which I’ll discuss later on in the review), kettle with plenty of brew kit, hair dryer, plenty of drawer space, no wardrobe, but there is a rail with a few coat hangers that you can hang an amazing amount of clothes on (we brought a huge amount of clothes already ironed and on hangers, and we managed to get them all on this substantial rail), plenty of electrical sockets around the room (the four table lamps in the room also had two USB charging ports in each of them – nice touch, and extremely useful), king size bed which was comfortable with decent bedding, a couple of armchairs, large full length mirror which was near an electrical socket to allow my wife to do her hair and make-up, also another large mirror in the bathroom that lit up, soft towels and a small amount of toiletries. ||The radiator in the room was brilliant, in that the heat was almost instant on turning the thermostat up, and we were toasty warm throughout our stay. Above and beyond this it was directly below the clothes rail, so it dried off wet clothing in no time at all, which was important as it was lashing down on our first day here, and our clothes were dry so very quickly after we hung them up. There was also a heated towel rail in the en-suite which kept that area lovely and warm as well. ||There was an iron and ironing board outside in corridor. ||What there wasn’t, was a safe in the room. Now, we have stayed in a lot of accommodations throughout the World, and this is mainly a trait of UK hotels and B&Bs (most accommodation abroad supply safes, and it’s highly unusual when they don’t) which in this age of expensive mobile devices I can’t really understand. We had two Android tablets, a laptop and money that we would have liked to have kept safe in the room, but I had to leave the mobile electronic devices in the boot of the car when we were out and about (now, I’m not suggesting for one instant that these items would have been unsafe in the room, but I considered it safer to leave them hidden under the false floor in the boot of my car), and carry the money around with us. ||The shower cubicle was a good size (many B&Bs have cubicles that you can barely squeeze into). The water pressure was good with instant hot water, but this shower had something that I've never come across before, in that if you turn it past the off setting it turns icy cold, so beware.||The WiFi was a bit of a ‘mare to get connected to initially (I worked in technology for a great number of years, so I’m by no means a technophobe). It took forever to connect, then it was reporting that there was no internet when connected. After another while it was supposedly fully connected, but was still a bit flaky, and I ended up using my O2 data which was running at 4G. I measured the speed of the WiFi when it was connected at 18 Mbps, but this speed is useless if the signal comes and goes. I’m putting this down to the thickness of the walls.||Breakfast had to be ordered on a form the evening before, which I've never been a fan of, as I think that it's quite difficult deciding what you fancy 12 hours or so before you sit down to it. I'm fairly sure the reason is to save wastage, thus saving the hotel money, and also I suppose it makes it easier on the kitchen staff, knowing what to prepare prior to guests arriving for breakfast, so although I'm never over enamoured by this way of ordering breakfast, I suppose that it's fair enough, and it’s a small niggle of mine that wouldn't bother most people I reckon. Saying all this the breakfasts were very good, but it really was a faff having to make sure you filled in what you wanted the next day for breakfast.||Due to the location of the hotel it was very quiet in the room at night after hours, but not so much during the day and early evening. Our room was at the front of the hotel just above the front door. There is quite a lot of noise from patrons as they stand and smoke outside and also a lot of people were noisy on leaving the bars, with little respect for the hotel guests. This could be expected of accommodation in a pub, and to be truthful it wasn’t all that bad, and on most occasions came and went within a few minutes. ||We bought a dinner meal here on one of the evenings that we stayed and it was very good, both in value, presentation and taste, so I would recommend the restaurant for food if you are staying here. The prices are on par with most other restaurants around the Welshpool area.||We really enjoyed our stay here and would recommend this hotel and we would definitely stay here again.
