Travelodge St. Albans City Centre — Hotel in St Albans

The Travelodge St Albans now has electronic entry rather than human beings at reception. The hotel does not feel as safe anymore. In April / May I stayed in St Albans Travelodge and the police swat team was in the hotel one afternoon when I returned. This was due to a suspicious object being found in one of the rooms by one of the cleaners. There as a skeleton of staff available. Overnight now there do not appear to be any staff available or a single security guard. I have entered the hotel a number of times and no-one is present in the foyer or cafe. In case of emergency, there will be a tragedy at some stage because of the absence of staff. I really do not know what would happen if there was a fire and how guests would be guided out of the hotel. This is a significant issue for disabled or vulnerable people. Since the electronic entry, I have met a number of residents having difficulty entering their rooms as well as i. n need of assistance from staff. Also, you cannot leave baggage at the hotel anymore. I think that the Travelodge has made a substantial strategic mistake dispensing with reception staff. Penny rich and pound poor. I think that they will have a sizeable common law problem if someone is injured or attacked within the hotel and no staff are available. There was a domestic incident the last time that I stayed in the St Albans hotel . I came out of my room because of the screaming as well as three other men to see if a female guest needed assistance. There was no staff member available to ask for police assistance. We were in two minds about calling the police and cautious to intervene. I had to use a video facility to speak with a staff member (by video in another building) who said that the matter would be referred to a supervisor. This was an immediate issue and I advised that the police needed to attend immediately to do a welfare check on the female guest. I followed up a few hours later and no police had attended and the issue was referred, I think, by email rather than police being called immediately. This is not the way to run a hotel of any sort. Following this incident, I stayed in a hotel in Milan with similar electronic entry and encountered guests who needed assistance and no-one was available. As a result, on returning to St Albans I chose not to stay at the Travelodge again (having previously spent more than 15 nights at the hotel). I counsel that anyone who is disabled or feels vulnerable should avoid those hotels with electronic entry and no reception staff present. You are...

Probably the worst on-site hotel management I’ve ever experienced - and I’ve spent thousands of nights in hotels and serviced apartments in my time !||- Apart from it generally being a fairly pointless exercise to contact them anyway, the only way to reach the on-site management is either by going down to the ground floor and using the check-in machine to call them, or by using the equally useless “StaySmart” app to call them - in both cases the person you’re talking to sounds like they’re in a toilet bowl, so are very hard to understand !||- Fortunately I did manage to cajole a local phone number off them so that I could call them on a real phone but, as I said earlier, this was a bit pointless as I asked them to come and repair the controls to our room air conditioner 4 or 5 times (I lost count !) and, despite being told that someone would attend to it, there was never any evidence that anyone did.||- So I had to resort to calling them to ask them to turn on the air conditioner when we came back to the hotel in the evenings, and then turn it off again when we went to sleep (and on again in the morning, etc).||- Also, we did leave out one of the “Please top Me Up” (or whatever the wording was) signs on our door one morning, but that was also completely ignored - so we just resorted to asking at the bar for more toilet paper and / or teabags, etc, when we needed them.||||SO WE WON’T BE RUSHING...

The hotel itself is in a city centre and ideally located, however there is no reception just digital keys cards meaning a limited staff presence. Subsequently there were lots of unknown people including local drunks gathered outside of the front of the hotel doing god knows what until late in to the night ….. it was unnerving at best and had I been on my own I don’t think I would have stayed. I get the impression it may be being utilised by the council for temporary housing in addition to paying guests. The construction of the hotel is cheap and flimsy. You can hear the guests above you every time they walk across the floor and you hear every guest walking down the corridor. The rooms are extremely small, as are the bathrooms. When sat on the toilet, the sink touches your arm. The fan in the bathroom is on all the time and is very noisy in the middle of the night (sounds like an old fridge). The curtains are cheap and do not block light. Someone had stolen the batteries out of our tv remote and we could not find anyone to resolve the issue. The bed and pillows were uncomfortable and not the greatest. I recognise this is a cheaper option but honestly I would pay the extra and stay at the Premier Inn (we had the dog with us so it wasn’t an option). This is the third awful experience I’ve had at a Travel Lodge and it will be the last booking I ever...