Coventry – Ibis Coventry South
This Accor hotel is about a thirty-minute walk from Coventry and isn’t very well reviewed on-line, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d make of it. It’s a motel type set-up, with the office and reception separate from the main accommodation block. There’s not much that can be done about that now, but it probably wasn’t a great design when conceived twenty years ago or so. I’ve stayed in numerous motels in the United States, but I can’t recall of one which hasn’t had the reception built into the main part of the building.
The separate accommodation block. My first impressions was that there were people playing music outside who probably should have been told to stop by the hotel staff. I’m getting ever more immune to noise and quite liked the bizarre conversations that they were having, but I can see why the hotel gets negative reviews about this entire set-up. It doesn’t give a good first impression and there’s plenty of space for the hotel to ask guests to move to if they want to sit outside and listen to music.
The interior of the rooms surprised me, as although the exterior is very not Ibis like, the rooms have been refitted to meet the brand standard. Indeed, the rooms were clean, well presented and fully functional, which entirely satisfied my requirements. I suspect that the cost of bringing this set-up into the rooms was quite expensive, so there’s been a financial commitment here to the hotel’s future. The rooms were cool in temperature and I could open the window, but there was no air conditioning.
The hotel’s restaurant is currently closed, although they are still doing a basic food menu. It’s one of the restaurants that in normal times does that annoying thing of having 50% off to people who use things such as the Gourmet Society and Tastecard. Lovely if you’re loyal to the Gourmet Society, but perhaps less so if you were just loyal to Accor and didn’t realise.
I didn’t see any interesting beer options for my rewards drink, so limited myself just to a Coke. The bar area was sort of open, but it didn’t feel entirely inviting, so I just brought it back to my room.
I’m not a driver, so the car park situation has little relevance to me, but there is some fining set-up in place for those who don’t pay the car park charge. This might have been removed now, but the hotel has a whole host of complaints going back years on how guests have received a fine through the post. Likely not ideal and I’m surprised they need to charge for car parking this far out of the city centre.
Anyway, I slept very well and had no noise disturbances at all, which moderately surprised me. The corridor outside the room with limited glazing does drag the hotel’s reviews down, although I was nearly at the end of an external corridor so didn’t have many people needing to walk this far down. Given that the room cost under £40, which was nearly all paid for by Accor Rewards points, I thought this was actually perfectly decent value for money. For those who want something nearer to Coventry, Ibis also have another hotel in the city centre (but that was obviously more expensive, so I traipsed out here).
