STAYING in a hotel should be a wonderful luxury, but they seem to love rules and customs that make it a pain in the arse. Like these.
Check in 4pm, Check out 10am
Hotels want you to spend as little time there as possible. If you arrive at 3.59pm you’ll be greeted with an annoyed tut, and if you stay beyond 10.01, housekeeping will try to make the bed with you still in it. Does it take six hours to clean a room? Judging by those weird stains on the pillow cases, maybe it does.
The minibar
A minibar sounds like it will be a convenient way for you to consume drinks and snacks while you relax in your stylish room. The reality is that you’ll spend £7 on a can of Coke and £12 on a bag of salted cashews, which you eat, weeping, while looking out over a view of the M6 just outside Birmingham.
Expensive, crap wifi
Wifi is a vital service, like running water, and yet hotels make it fiendishly difficult and horribly expensive to use. After you’ve gone through the lengthy process of logging in you get 15 minutes for free, before having to shell out £10 for 24 hours access. You check out eight hours later having found out that you can’t even use it to watch porn.
Buffet breakfasts
You imagine stacks of fluffy pancakes, perfectly crisp bacon and jugs of freshly squeezed orange juice. But the reality is rubbery eggs swimming in grease, questionable sausages and individual packs of supermarket-brand cornflakes. Still, you paid for it, so you stuff yourself, and then spend the rest of the day suffering.
Bedroom to bathroom proximity
When you booked your romantic city break, you failed to factor in that you can’t afford a suite which means you’ll have to take a shit within approximately two metres of your hot new lover. Yes, there’s a wall between you, but it’s just a bit of cheap plasterboard so the incredible intimacy you’ll be experiencing together is the sound and smells of each other’s bowel movements.
