Travelodge v Premier Inn: battle of the budget hotels
I swear I read this Times article a lot more recently than two years ago. But given how time apparently starts to gallop in middle age, who knows. I have a Times subscription so I’ve no idea if it’s paywalled. A recent stay in a Travelodge after a gap of a few years brought it to mind.
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| The Travelodge logo |
The Travelodge reviewer in the Times article stayed in a ‘Super’ room at the Travelodge London City, itself billed as a ‘flagship’ Travelodge. The Travelodge PLUS programme, of which the London City hotel is evidently part, was launched in 2018 and features the Super Room category and a new Bar Café concept. I’ve never stayed in one. Unless there are a lot of them, they’re a bit of a suspect comparison – it would be fairer to compare a “regular” Travelodge with a regular PI.
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| The Premier Inn logo |
The Premier Inn reviewer in the article stayed at the Worcester City Centre branch (one that Ruth and I have stayed in; it overlooks the cricket ground), and notes the addition of Premier Plus rooms, as well as the chain's London-based ‘Hub by Premier Inn’ outlets (I stayed in one of these in 2021 - unbelievably tiny room but nice and amazingly high-tech bed). Premier Inns are slightly more expensive than Travelodges and generally have a dining option, whether this is an integrated restaurant or an arrangement with a pub/restaurant next door. Travelodges were originally on A-roads or motorways, and therefore pretty much always had a Little Chef or a motorway service station next door, so I guess the ‘dining option’ thing was kind of catered for; the newer ones in town centres don't have dining options, or at least I didn't think they did, but the introduction of the Bar Cafés in some is presumably an attempt to be more competitive with PI.
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| Bed at the Hub by Premier Inn London Soho |
Since the advent of Premier Inns I rarely stay in Travelodges, as they now seem slightly shabby in comparison. However, I do have a nostalgic fondness for the earlier days of Travelodges and can still remember how lovely, clean and modern they seemed when I first stayed in them.
History and ownership
Travelodge has had a chequered ownership. It was originally owned by Trusthouse Forte, then bought by Granada in the 1990s. Ownership passed to Compass Group in 2001, then to Permira in 2003, and then to Dubai International Capital, a UAE-based company, in 2006. Since 2012 it’s been owned by Goldman Sachs and various hedge funds. Premier Inn has always been owned by Whitbread, though it’s only been called that since 2007; Whitbread established it as “Travel Inn” in 1987.
The excellent Motorway Services Online has some interesting stuff on the history of Travelodge. They were originally Forte Travelodge and I remember them forming part of Forte’s comfortingly reassuring collection of graded hotels, with Travelodge being the most basic, then Posthouse, Crest and Grand, in order of splendour. I never stayed in a Grand; I did stay in a Crest once, in Exeter, and I remember staying in at least a couple of Posthouses. Travelodge grew out of Little Chef Lodge, which MSO notes was the UK’s first budget hotel chain; this was owned by Forte and became Forte Travelodge in 1988, merging with a US-brand TraveLodge. MSO note that "many Forte Travelodge customers were 'trading up' from the less desirable accommodation they would normally stay in".
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| Me outside a Forte Posthouse in Hampstead in 1995 |
Prior to the more recent Travelodge PLUS upgrade, an earlier modernisation programme completed in late 2015 which gave Travelodges a makeover from their original branding. My extended Travelodge stay in 2014 - see below - was during the modernisation period, as some of the hotels I stayed at had been modernised (Old Stratford, MK Central) while others (Buckingham, Marston Moretaine, Shenley Church End) hadn’t.
My early Travelodge forays
I first came across Travelodges in the early 1990s when I was in my early twenties and they seemed to me an absolutely wonderful alternative to the B&Bs or cheap hotels which were my alternatives at the time. Then, they seemed to be mainly beside dual carriageways; they seem to have moved more into city centres since. I may be being over-nostalgic but I have more of a fondness for the roadside motel-ethos of the original type.
I think I first stayed in a Travelodge with Ray in 1992 – we had been part of an organized 18 Plus holiday to the Haven park at Caister, but made our escape after a couple of nights (I’d been the previous year, and rapidly realized that once had been enough) and went to visit Cambridge. We phoned the nearest Travelodge – on an A-road somewhere on the outskirts of the city, from memory – and as I recall were disappointed to find it booked up for that night. It had availability the following night, so we booked it, and sucked up staying in a cheap B&B that night, which, true to its type, had a shaky-looking shower in the corner of the room (presumably thereby enabling it to claim ensuite facilities) and various handwritten notices stuck around the room. The only one I remember was telling us not to throw condoms down the toilet, but there were probably others telling us not to speak, leave our pants on the floor, etc.
Ray and I were sufficiently taken with Travelodges to subsequently take a whole week’s holiday travelling around the country and staying in different ones. I can’t find any photographs from this trip, though it seems unlikely that I didn’t take any as I did own a camera at the time. Who knows. I can’t definitively remember all the hotels we stayed in, though I think we started the trip by driving up the A1 to Scotch Corner and staying in the Travelodge there, before working our way back down the country.
The Travelodge Year
Much more recently, I found myself unexpectedly staying in Travelodges for a good portion of 2014, following the burglary at my first rented MK flat around the end of 2013. Because of the burglary I didn’t initially feel inclined to rent another flat and dithered a bit about what to do. My head of unit at the time did not like staff working from home (oh, sweet irony) meaning that my modest request to work from home one day a week on a temporary basis to save on hotel bills met with a “No”. I think originally I only intended the Travelodge arrangement to be for a month or so, but it stretched to most of the year until I cracked and took out my tenancy at Wolverton Park in early 2015.
Although the Travelodge thing was OK initially, it rapidly became fairly depressing, in part because in order to make the four nights a week thing affordable, I was often obliged to stay at the OK but moderately drab pre-refurb Buckingham hotel, which still had old style branding, chunky grey CRT TVs and an offputtingly musty smell in more than one of the ground floor rooms. Also, I think that regular existence in hotel rooms, as opposed to the odd stay as I do now, can give you a sense of a little too much anonymity. The post-refurb Old Stratford hotel was much nicer and I did book in there as often as I could. The also-post-refurb MK Central hotel near the railway station was generally more expensive and I only stayed there for the odd night.
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| A room at the Buckingham Travelodge in March 2014 |
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| A room at the MK Central Travelodge, also in March 2014 |
Although I’m being a bit rude about the Buckingham hotel – it was the one I stayed in most and I was moderately depressed for much of the time - I did encounter a couple of worse ones. I ruled out the Shenley Church End establishment early on after only a couple of stays. That was a dreary former Innkeepers Lodge that hadn’t then even been updated to Travelodge’s old branding, never mind their new branding – the rooms didn’t seem Travelodgey, too much dark wood and I have a feeling they might even have had actual keys to the doors. I remember on one of the stays being given a room that didn’t lock and having to go back to reception to say “um, no” – it can’t have been fully booked (perhaps unsurprisingly) so they did re-allocate me to a different one. (On the other hand, they did at least have modern-style TVs in the rooms, which I had forgotten until I revisited the photo below.) Judging by their current entry on Travelodge's website, the hotel has now been refurbed. Sadly too late to rescue it in my eyes though. My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.1
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| The Travelodge Shenley Church End |
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| A room at the Travelodge Shenley Church End in February 2014 |
I also once stayed in the Marston Moretaine hotel just off the A421 on the east side of MK, which was also pretty awful - I was initially given a room that stank of cigarette smoke, despite the hotel’s allegedly no-smoking policy, and I remember leading the guy on reception through the equally faggy-smelling corridor to my room so that he could smell it. I think he said something non-committal, but did give me a different room at a fresher end of the building. The one upside of the MM hotel was that at the time it still had a Little Chef next door, as these opened early and gave you somewhere to get breakfast (something that was a challenge all the way through the Travelodge Year). I remember having a quite OK cafetiere of coffee and some passable French toast.
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| View from my room at the Travelodge Marston Moretaine in June 2014 |
The LC has presumably gone now, as I think they all have. I do remember Little Chefs quite fondly; they were OK. I remember having a number of their “Early Starter” breakfasts in younger years. Strangely enough there was a piece on the BBC News website about them only this week.
While I was staying at the Buckingham Travelodge, the former Little Chef building was boarded up the entire time (probably adding to the faintly depressing air) but has now been freshened up into a Starbucks. I don’t particularly like Starbucks but much better to have the building back in use.
Some 'just add water' fodder, of the type I was often reduced to during the Travelodge Year:
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More disturbingly, I also found this picture from 2014, with what looks like a Travelodgey backdrop. I don't remember often drinking über-budget wine, but perhaps I did.
Recent post-COVID times and Premier Inn use
Since working from home, moving back to Reading and the opening up of society again, I have been travelling up to MK every 2-3 weeks to spend a couple of days working on campus, to remind myself that I do actually have an employer (not that the regular Teams meetings and pay packet aren’t also a reminder of this, but you know).
Requiring overnight accommodation for a night every two weeks, as opposed to four nights a week, obviously affords much more choice of where you stay, with the result that I’ve been opting for Premier Inns pretty much every time. Milton Keynes has at least four Premier Inns which, if you book them a reasonable distance ahead and on the right night of the week (Tuesday: not great; Thursday: great) are very reasonable. I’m often able to book a “Premier Plus” room for only around the £60 mark. As the Times piece says, this gets you complimentary “Ultimate” Wifi (though actually PI’s free wifi is not too bad), an armchair with a footstool, a mini-fridge containing bottled water, a Nespresso machine and a piece of artwork with an artists’s label (albeit the one in the photo below was called 'Untitled'2). You do also, as Liz Edwards says in the Times article above, get to approach them down a better-smelling corridor, with a DIFFERENT CARPET from the regular room corridor. Perhaps it’s sprayed with special “posh corridor” smell.
Here are some soothing pictures of a Premier Plus room I stayed in recently at Milton Keynes' Willen Lake hotel.
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| 'Untitled' by Gemma |
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| Extra large shower |
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| The Standard Plus tray of stuff |
2 Why do artists do this? If you're going to go to the effort of painting something, might as well title it while you're at it.
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