I booked this hotel purely on the basis of seeing rave reviews on here, and the fact that it's currently no.1 in the ratings for Colchester. After reading such glowing praise, I was a little disappointed by what I found upon arrival at the hotel.

The room had the usual facilities you'd expect in a chain motel - small tv, (not a large range of free channels available) tea/coffee making facilities. We had a non-smoking room as requested, but either the last guest had been having a sneaky one in the bathroom or someone had been smoking just outside in the corridor as there was a faint but lingering smell of smoke. This may be an irrelevance since smoking will be banned in public places in July, but I don't know if this will just apply to places like the bar/restaurant or to hotel rooms as well.

The bathroom in particular looked rather dated, the shower wasn't very good with water spraying slightly out of the side of the head, and there were a couple of cracked bathroom tiles. So it had a rather tired look about it. Worse was to come when I used the loo, flushed it and there was an incredibly loud humming noise which went on for several minutes - the bathroom was actually vibrating, so loud was this noise. We went to complain and the manager was very prompt and helpful about getting it sorted out, to his credit. Fortunately there was a handyman on site who got it fixed in about 15 minutes. Apparently he'd been just about to go off duty. I suspected this wasn't the first time this had happened - probably a recurring fault.

I thought the area downstairs was a little dated too - to give just one example they should get rid of the fake houseplants just outside the boardroom area, they are not convincing enough to fool anyone (they did have some real plants too in lighter areas).

The restaurant seemed pretty expensive so we didn't try it out during our stay. The deal we were on did not include breakfast - and we were not prepared to pay (I think) about 11 pounds for full breakfast and 8 pounds for continental. There is a pub called the Crown nearby which might be a better option for dinner if you're not going into Colchester for the evening - the menu was reasonably priced and although we didn't get around to trying it out, the food smelled good. The pub was just a couple of minutes walk along the slip road if you walked leftwards out of the hotel driveway.

The good points about the hotel? Staff are generally quite friendly, the bar is quite good, the drinks by comparison with the food are reasonable enough.

All in all it didn't turn out so bad in the end, but I didn't find it so good that I would be very likely to return.