Holiday Inn Express Newcastle Gateshead By IHG

We come to Newcastle to surprise some family for both birthdays and father's day. The hotel was very welcoming. The room was lovely and spacious aswell as clean with an added bonus of spare toiletries needed if you had forgotten. WiFi available throughout so my husband was able to log on quickly for work. Breakfast was great and also an added bonus included in the price of weekend stay which I thought was great value for money

My wife and I booked for the weekend. We knew it's nothing fancy but: the bedside lights were short-circuiting and unusable if you wanted to read in bed without bothering your partner (the lights were flashing off and on, like strobes); the silly door to the bathroom is arranged so that, as you open it to walk in, it can close into another door-frame which is located inside the bathroom at less than 90°, to close off the toilet footprint from the rest of the bathroom and, as you hold the door from the opening edge (sometimes you do, not from the handle) your fingers get jammed in that second frame which you aren't expecting to find, which happened twice to me and once to my wife; and the bed was terrible, it leaned towards the head and to one side, meaning we spent two nights fighting gravity. We are both exhausted from not having slept properly on our weekend away. The whole hotel feels dated and you get the idea they don't really care. We told the staff about the lights and they simply said they'd tell maintenance to fix in the morning (on the day we were checking out). I'd have expected us to be moved to a different room (even given an upgrade). Silly me, but lesson learnt. Other points: holes in the wall from past fixtures left undecorated; USB plug only on one side of the bed so you couldn't both charge your phone/watch on the night while keeping on the bedside table.

I stayed here for just one night en route to Scotland and I was really impressed. Conveniently located just off the A1M and directly opposite the Metrocentre complex with its array of retail and dining outlets, this is an older style Holiday Inn Express which has had a bit of a refurb in terms of decor and some of the furniture in the public areas. It offers plenty of free parking which is a bonus these days given that many other similar hotels now charge for this. Whilst rather dated in terms of furnishings and fixtures, my twin room was spotlessly clean and very well maintained, with good, comfortable beds. Power points in the room are limited but there’s a useful twin USB point in between the beds. The shower was a reasonable size and the bathroom was in good condition. The room (situated in the hotel’s quieter Tyne wing, which has only a handful of rooms per floor) was also reasonably noise free, albeit the property backs on to a branch railway line so the odd rumble of local trains could be heard from time to time. One point to bear in mind is that the rooms don’t appear to have any form of air conditioning other than an opening window, but even in July the room was not stiflingly hot. The inclusive breakfast was very good indeed with a full selection of hot and cold breakfast items, and a large, clean, bright, spacious seating area. Best of all was the price - all this for under £60 on a weekend night. Remarkable value in this day and age in which other, so-called ‘budget’ chains seem to think everyone has an open-ended budget for a simple, roadside one-night stay. Highly recommended.