RECENTLY you may have seen Sleuth break the news that Britannia Hotels are crap.
Shocker that one.
Surely the room couldn't just be ok. That's where this whole facade would come crashing down. Perhaps an axe murderer lay in wait behind the shower curtain
Readers of consumer magazine Which? Travel had voted the Britannia hotel group the worst of them all. Scoring only 36% in an online satisfaction survey, well below second bottom Travelodge with 50%, Ramada with 51%, Jurys Inn with 56% while at the top of the tree stood Premier Inns with 76%, the Radisson Blu Edwardian with 77% and QHotels (The Midland Hotel is the Manchester representative) crowned the champ with 78%.
Rated across six categories, Britannia scored a pitiful one out of five for cleanliness, room fixtures and value for money.
The very OK room
The chain has hotels on Portland Street, Tib Street in the Northern Quarter, one in Didsbury and one at the airport. A quick visit to TripAdvisor will tell you that Sachas on Tib Street is not only the worst of all the Manchester Britannias, but one of the worst hotels in all of Manchester, with around half of its customers rating it as ‘terrible’.
It doesn’t make for pretty reading: “The hotel is a crack den”… “This hotel is shocking”… “the hairdryer began to melt and nearly set on fire”… “Horrendous, appalling, filthy cess-pit”… “like Fawlty Towers”… “this should be closed down” - and they were the better ones.
So, naturally, this is the Britannia that the editor would have me stay at.
On the way over, I was considering all the places that I’d rather be staying than Sachas: the deepest darkest corner of the Mariana Trench, anywhere in Scunthorpe, or perhaps sharing a Guantanamo cell with Joseph Fritzl and Hannibal Lecter.
But you know what… It really wasn’t all that bad.
Yes, the building itself, tucked behind Debenhams on Market Street, could barely be more vulgar. The huge red neon sign plastered above the entrance makes the place look like a bordello, those weird abscesses glued to the side of the building are made of fibre-glass and utterly pointless, as are the golden grates, and the building itself could do with a lick of paint, ideally a sand blasting. It’s grubby. All the while, across the road a vagrant pisses up against Debenham's fire escape. This portion of Tib Street is grim.
Grubby
Foyer: Red
Inside it’s all oversized chintzy chandeliers, glass on the ceilings, sagging leaflets, faux hollow Corinthian columns and red, just lots of tired red. Red carpets, red sofas, red roping and a red KitKat vending machine. But what I found most surprising, after all the tales of doom and gloom, was that I didn’t find anything particularly offensive. Just very faded.
In which case, the staff must be utter bastards.
Well, no actually.
Granted, it did take the receptionist around the same time to find me a room and check me in as it took the Chinese to build the entire Great Wall. But this was only her second day and she’d been left at reception to mostly fend for herself. Well that’s what she told me as she typed away with one hand, slapped the printer around with the other and answered seventeen phones with her feet.
Downstairs: The oars
Downstairs in a vast but ghostly quiet bar/restaurant, it looked as though, in some vain attempt to modernise, the management had thrown in four hundred black faux leather dining chairs and a couple of oddly placed multi-coloured disco lights into the middle of a scene from Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights in order to spruce things up a tad. It hadn't worked.
It was how I imagine an 80s Butlins dining room to have looked. One in Bognor. With a ship's wheel and oars inexplicably stuck to the walls and ceiling. Quite where this oddly placed touch of the nautical came from nobody knew. Not even the Duty Manager. Neither did he know why the hotel was called Sachas. Possibly something to do with a cow. Right.
Captain's wheel?
Still, nothing abhorrent down here. No kraken patrolling the tired and grimy looking pool which was thankfully closed. No neo-Nazi ruling the bar, just a young, chatty and ever so slightly defeated bar manager.
The food then must be dire.
But once again things turned out to be distinctly average. The steak (£13) was the only one I've ever had that looked entirely rare but tasted well done. It was chewy, over-priced and of poor quality, but not inedible. You'd certainly hope not for £13. The chips were chips.
The waiter though was fantastic (I believe he was called Victor), an older Mediterranean-looking chap running around on his own, a one man band who looked as though he'd been lifted from a family run seafood restaurant on a small Greek fishing harbour. He was a work horse and a credit to Britannia, a star amongst a sea of mediocrity.
Edible steak (£13)
I was beginning to wonder if I was in the right hotel. Where was the "crack-den"? Where was the "cess-pit"?
Surely the room couldn't just be ok. That's where this whole facade would come crashing down. Perhaps an axe murderer lay in wait behind the shower curtain, maybe I'd find there to be only three walls, a mattress made of granite and a pillow filled with nuts and bolts.
Wrong again. The room, the 'cheapest' they had (the word cheapest being in inverted commas because £75 is not cheap for the lowest tariff room in a low-grade hotel), was on the second floor and completely windowless. Unsurprisingly, Britannia prefer not to refer to it as a ‘windowless room’, they refer to it as a ‘City Room’ – which is terribly ironic considering that you can't actually see any of the city in a City Room.
Dusty
Still, it wasn't great but by no means was it the hell-hole I'd been expecting. Yes it was tired, but then the whole hotel was tired, there was a bed, two in fact, and surprisingly comfy at that. OK so the lamp shades could hardly have been more skew-whiff, the armchairs gave frayed a bad name, there was a stain on my pillow, no natural light, a good helping of dust, a TV shipped in from 1995, a telephone above the sink, a metal bottle opener nailed to the bathroom wall, a shower that could peel the skin off a rhino and a constant but seemingly unstoppable blowing emanating from the ceiling, like a 50W hairdryer. All night long.
This is me trying to turn it off:
But it was no 'cess-pit'. There was no sign of, as the editor once found in a Britannia hotel, a baguette from 1972 hidden under the mattress.
It had all been, from a reviewer's perspective at least, both relievingly uneventful and disappointingly uneventful. Nothing to praise or lambaste, just a succession of things to greet with: "Hmm"... "Alright"... "OK"..."Meh".
It was all so terribly knackered and boring. Give me a Fawlty Towers any day.
Oh no wait, the breakfast was a f**king travesty. Ahh that feels much better.
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Sachas, Tib Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M4 1SH. 0871 222 0018
Economy city twin room £75. Breakfast (don't do it) £5 on booking. £10.99 on the morning.
