A UK hotel described as a cross between Fawlty Towers and The Shining lived up to its terrible reviews, with an eerie atmosphere and a disturbing discovery in one of the beds
A hotel with some of the most scathing Tripadvisor reviews ever seen offered a stained mattress, broken windows, and a mysterious long black hair in one of its beds for a bargain £42 a night.
The Inglewood Hotel, in Torquay, Devon was described by one dissatisfied customer as “a doss hole,” and by another as “a cross between Fawlty Towers and the Overlook hotel in The Shining.”
Certainly the hotel seemed as eerily deserted as Stephen King’s horror creation, and intrepid podcaster Joe Fish had to make quite a lot of effort to find someone to unlock the door and actually let him in. Once inside, he found signs of neglect and decay everywhere: “Things are certainly starting to fall apart at the Inglewood Hotel,” he said.
He added that the establishment scores a 5/10 rating on Booking.com, and pointed out: “For a place to have five out of 10, with over 300 reviews the place has to be doing something quite wrong.”
A cursory check of the bed revealed some suspicious staining on the mattress, with worse to come: “I’ve just pulled back the sheet and there’s a big black curly hair,” Joe said before adding, in a concerned tone: “and that ain’t mine.”
The Inglewood’s main problem appears to be that it’s desperately understaffed. Apart from Joe’s 10-minute wait for someone to let him in when he first arrived, several former customers have commented that staff – while perfectly pleasant and helpful when you can find them – are remarkably thin on the ground.
The hotel’s listing promises “a pool and an on-site restaurant” but the pool appears to have been closed for quite some time, and former guests say the restaurant’s meal times were unusually strict.
One recalled: “You had to be in the dining room at beginning of service (breakfast 7.30 and dinner 7pm), if not, the guy would come and knock our door and tell us we needed to come to eat.”
They added that the meals were not necessarily worth walking downstairs for: “Meals were being brought across the road from sister hotel. Food was very strange and very like ‘ready meals’. Full breakfast consisted of one rasher of overcooked bacon (like cardboard), one sausage , an overcooked fried egg and swimming in beans and tinned tomatoes.”
Photos provided by reviewers tell a story of rushed, slipshod cleaning and very sketchy maintenance, with broken windows and mouldy baths.
One particularly surreal image from Joe’s visit showed a large cooking-pot left in one of the hallways – either as an attempt at decoration or simply because the staff member couldn’t think of anywhere else to put it.
One positive noted by several reviewers is that at leat there was ample hot water in the shower. Perhaps too hot in some cases: “Water skin-strippingly hot, from cold tap too,” wrote one, before adding “This place should be shut down.”
