Eastbourne – Glastonbury Hotel

I extended my trip to Eastbourne at the last minute, so the price of the accommodation options were rather more decadent than I would ideally like. However, the Glastonbury Hotel was reasonably priced, although a quick glance of the reviews showed that they were all over the place in terms of what guests thought about the place. However, they weren’t bad enough to stop me booking, although I was unsure of the quality of the experience that I had ahead.

The pre-arrival e-mail explained that I mustn’t smoke, bring alcohol into the hotel, be excessively loud, break anything in the room, check in after 21:00 and so on. I understand that they’ve clearly had problems with rule breakers, but inconsiderate guests will do those things anyway. Hotels are really meant to be places that someone looks forwards to going to, a list of warnings isn’t a great start.

However, the check-in at reception was friendly and personable, so all was well. The bar area had a lot of chairs crammed in, but it wasn’t entirely clear when and if it was actually open. The hotel also has a snooker club underneath it, but there was no mention of that to guests, a puzzling omission of information. The locking system for the room door was also explained to me, something which numerous previous reviews have touched on.

Given I had booked the cheapest room, I was surprised to be given a room with such a lovely view of the coast (the cheapest rooms normally get a view of the car park and air conditioning units). The balcony stretched along the front of all of the rooms on that floor, which I didn’t overly like, but there’s something very authentic about a seaside stay when it’s possible to hear the waves crashing onto the beach.

The room was also fine, with the bathroom looking like it has just been modernised. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the room was spotless, but it didn’t give me any concerns in terms of the cleanliness. Everything was functional and there were no noise issues either internally or externally during my stay. The lock on the room was fiddly, it needs to be turned on the reverse and it sometimes wouldn’t turn, so a slight faff. The hotel would perhaps be wise to replace all of the locks, maybe even going as far as switching to use key cards rather than physical keys. The water in the hotel also seems to be either cold or scalding hot, of which never are really ideal.

The hotel corridors were a complete maze and there was a lot of paper signage to try and get guests to their rooms. I must admit to needing a few attempts to remember where the staircase was that I needed to get to my room, as there are several going off to various other parts of the building. There are fire doors in some inconvenient places when using the stairs, although the hotel doesn’t have much choice in that. There’s definitely still a feeling of the 1960s with the hotel corridors, all rather dated. However, it’ll cost a fortune to modernise all of this, and even if they do that, then I likely wouldn’t booked here as it would be too expensive. Personally, I suspect that they’re probably best to leave it, just improve the signage a little (and the fire signage definitely needs looking at).

I do wonder as well what the history of this building was, I’ve been fascinated before about what hotels used to be like. When the Queen’s Hotel was constructed in Eastbourne in the 1880s there were just a couple of bathrooms in the entire building and a limited number of toilets were located in a different wing. Guests would be used to trundling throughout the hotel in the early twentieth century to use the facilities, causing no end of issues over recent decades when trying to cram en-suites into rooms in these Victorian hotels.

And the views in the evening, definitely rather pleasant.

I liked this hotel, despite its obvious flaws. I got the impression that the owners are trying to steadily improve it, whilst trying to cater for coach parties and the budget end of the market in the meantime. It’s likely an exciting challenge, clearly they’ve already gone some way in terms of the modernisation as my bathroom was modern and relatively new. The public areas need a lot of improvement, they seem very underused and that ground floor area near reception would make an ideal craft beer bar……