Premier Inn Hemel Hempstead West hotel — Hotel in Dacorum

As a bed for the night the Premier Inn was adequate. You have to be realistic with any Premier Inn. Although you are more than within your rights to expect good service, this is not a stay at The Ritz. This was our second choice of location for the weekend stay as our first choice was unavailable at the time.

I accept this isn't the fault of Premier Inn but the petrol heads cruising up and down the A41 until the early hours of the morning with their loud exhausts didn't make it easy to sleep. The room was very warm with no air conditioning so opening the window was the only way to cool the room down making the car noises even louder.

My main gripe with the room was the smoke detector on the wall above the entrance door. It was an Hochiki ALN-EN model which people in the industry (like me) will be aware that these models have 2 green flashing LED's in them and they flash every few minutes. This flashing was enough to brighten the room up also making it difficult to sleep.

The bed and room amenities were very good and the room itself was clean.

We ate in the hotel restaurant which was one of the smaller restaurants I've ever experienced in a Premier Inn so I expected the service to be good due its size. Upon arriving we were told that there would be a 30 minute wait for food as they were busy. We weren't too worried about this as the kids had iPad's to keep them occupied.

Our orders were taken quite quickly. The wait staff were very good and quite attentive. The food quality, delivery and cleanliness of the restaurant was where it fell down dramatically. The booth where we were sitting was very dusty and looked like it had not been cleaned with any effort in some time. My son ran his finger along the partition frames and it was thick with dust.

Our projected half hour wait for our food was only a pipe dream. We sat down at 19:00, our mains were served to us at 20:30, 90 minutes after the order was taken during which time our very tired and hungry 10 year old daughter broke down in tears. When the food finally arrived it was not very good at all. My sons steak, which he asked to be cooked medium, was almost burnt. We sent it back and the replacement was cooked perfectly. The salads that accompanied our meals, I've never experienced anything like this in any eatery in the world. Our salad leaves had mud on them! I should have taken more pictures. Unfortunately I only discovered this after the majority of our food had been eaten or else it would have all gone back and we would have headed across the road to McDonalds.

After we complained about our meals no less than 3 times to the wait staff, they agreed to knock half off of our bill which was very good of them. We could see that the poor wait staff were getting very frustrated with the kitchen. We could hear that other customers in the restaurant were having similar problems with their meals.

The breakfast the following morning was literally night and day compared the the previous evenings meals and experience. The food was of a good quality and served promptly. Although the majority of it was probably pre-cooked being a basic menu, this didn't have a negative effect on the quality at all.

I would stay here again if it was my only choice but it would remain my...

The room is what you would expect, clean tidy, but hot.

The food was very good. By far the best that I had in a Premier Inn.

The service was disgusting, the first week of our stay we tried to check in and were told that we had to pay on arrival, although our business had paid for the room in advance and we had a receipt. Check-in took over an hour due to the Premier Inn representative arguing with us that she wasn't prepared to assist, despite having spoken to our authorising card holder. We had to pay and then claim back the fee.

A fee that we were not informed takes 20 days to process. We had a similar issue checking in for our third week, we were told that if we could forward the authorisation code email to them, it would be fine. We asked for the email address, only to be screamed at that it's on the original email sent.

During the third week, our rooms toilet was slightly leaking. This was noticed late in the evening of our first night, and by the morning, the bathroom floor was covered in water. This was reported when we went for breakfast. I was questioned,'What have you done to it?' And 'why didn't you tell us sooner?' This was followed up with 'We don't do maintenance until Friday, and we're not moving you.' We had never asked to be moved we were merely informing them that as of Tuesday they had a leak and now a bathroom pooling with water for 3 days before it would be looked at.

This was obviously not a happy team of colleagues. They were all miserable from breakfast til dinner. Most seemed on edge due to one person, as she was quite happy to shout at her colleagues just as much as her customers. She ordered guests around at check-in and breakfast/dinner services.

On our 2nd night at dinner service, we arrived 30 mins early so we could get a drink from the bar. That was wrong, and we were told off. 'Too early!' We were then seated bang on our reservation time and immediately asked what did we want to eat. She still had the menu's in her hand! We asked for a couple of minutes to decide, 1 minute later, she came back, and we'd only gotten as far as starters, off she huffed again. Over 20 minutes later she returned and sarcastically asked if we we're now ready and informed us we were holding up the kitchen as the chef needed the orders to keep coming in if he was going to keep his job and get paid!

I'm not sure if this particular colleague was just trying to be funny but it was far from hilarious. This review is long enough without me listing every detail from a 3 week business stay.

I believe the colleague in question was named Irene. So the generous minimum 1 star is for her, but the rest of the colleagues wouldn't earn more than 2...

Myself, my husband and our son were staying here from the 19th to the 21st of August. Everything was great, check in was quick, the room was lovely and clean. It was hot in the room but we knew it would be so we didn't mind.

But what I want to praise most is the staff. It was my son's 13th birthday on the 20th and I wanted to surprise him with tickets to the Harry Potter studio tour. I spoke to the lady at reception (unfortunately I didn't get her name) who said she'd gladly help me. When we came into the dining room for breakfast.....which was so lovely.........the other member of staff was really friendly and lovely. As we tucked into our breakfast the lady from reception came in and asked if there was an Ethan here, my son went bright red and put his hand up. She then presented him with his Hogwarts envelope and owl that delivered. They had even wrote him a card and had printed out lots of activity pages about Hogwarts which wasso thoughtful. My son was very embarrassed and shocked. The staff embarrassed him even more when they brought his cake out singing happy birthday, even the chef joined in. On the evening we dined in the hotel, our meal was fantastic so delicious and great value for money. Again the evening staff embarrassed my son by singing happy birthday to him when they brought his dessert out and as a birthday presenthis meal was free, which was very generous of them.

The staff made our stay very memorable and went above usual customer service. We would definitely...