Tag: Hotel
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Rembrandt, Ruffs and Radioactive Bathrooms: A Business Stay at the Leonardo
Right, so I’ve just come back from a couple of days in Amsterdam, ostensibly on business, which, in my case, involves a laptop, an expense account, and the ability to identify a decent gin and tonic at twenty paces, and I was billeted at the Leonardo Hotel Amsterdam Rembrandtpark. From the outside it looks like…
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Malmaison Manchester: From Boutique Chic to Beige Bath Mat
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There are two Malmaisons in Manchester and I can only pray this one is being quietly lined up for closure, because what I found here was a ghost of the hotel it once thought it was. Once, I imagine, it strutted about in funky wallpaper, lurid cushions, and furniture…
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Renaissance Shenzhen Bay: A Look into the Future
Shenzhen is the future. Not in the vague, Instagram-filtered sense that one throws around like confetti in European cities, but the proper, actual future. The sort where you step off a plane and feel that everything you thought was cutting-edge back home is suddenly quaint, pedestrian even. And at the heart of this futurism sits…
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W Hong Kong: Reception on the Sixth Floor, Energy Through the Roof
Right, so here we are then, in Hong Kong, a city that is less a place and more a bloody organism. It doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t yawn, it doesn’t even pause to scratch itself. It just goes. Ceaselessly. A thrum, a vibration, a caffeinated whirring of humanity that makes New York look like it’s having…
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Hotel 1898, Barcelona — A Boringly Brilliant Stay
You know when you book a hotel and you’re not entirely sure what you’re getting? That’s how I felt with Hotel 1898 in Barcelona. I’d clicked around their website for a bit, expecting… well, I don’t know what. Something faintly forgettable, perhaps. A boutique business stopover with slightly too much beige? A faded Spanish colonial…
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Ockenden Manor – A Glorious Collision of Tudor Timbers and Spa-Luxe Serenity
Sometimes in life the stars align. Not often. Usually, they scatter chaotically in the night sky, like crumbs on a Travelodge carpet, marking the celestial randomness of broken kettles and joyless buffet sausages. But every so often, bang — alignment. Precision. Harmony. A moment of such elegant serendipity that you half expect Richard Curtis to…
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The Banyan Tree, Dubai – A Rare Case of Style and Substance
The luxury hotel game is a tough one. It’s like trying to stay fashionable while married to someone who buys you trousers for Christmas from John Lewis. Keeping luxurious is no mean feat. Fashions and trends change faster than a Love Island contestant’s moral compass. And the second you so much as unlock your automatic…
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Roisa Hostal Boutique: A Stay on the Set of a Horror Film (With Bonus Trip Hazards!)
Well, how I’m here to write this review is beyond me. I spent three nights in what can only be described as a crossover between a low-budget horror film and a construction project that’s seemingly given up the will to live. I’ve stayed in some questionable hotels in my time, but never on an actual…
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Apex Hotel, Bath – A Decent Stay, If the Price is Right
I’ve never got on with local councils. I know they’re strapped for cash, but they seem to exist solely to make parking more expensive and planning applications impossible. And nowhere is this more evident than in Bath, a city of breathtaking Georgian beauty marred by the occasional concrete monstrosity that some council planning department inexplicably…
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The Alan: Where Manchester’s Cool Feels Warm
Manchester, they say, is trendy. Far too trendy for me, of course, which is a word I’ve now used twice and which, in itself, demonstrates how deeply untrendy I am. “Trendy” is surely not the word du jour. Nor, I suspect, is “cool,” which I’ve just used to underline how hopelessly adrift I am from…
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The Travel Critic 