HOLIDAY INN EXPRESS

One of the best HIE we've stayed in. Very friendly reception staff, fun barman in the evening. Breakfast was fresh and plentiful. Very busy hotel, will certainly return.

Clean and basic as one would expect from Holiday Inn. Location is rather unexpected as its on an industrial estate and a bit out of the centre of Cambridge itself, but that was ok for what I wanted. But if you're looking for a pretty location, its anything but! Fine for business travel, not for a holiday stay. Room was clean and the batting staff very helpful when I did not know how to turn on the lights. Meet and greet staff were also pleasant. Breakfast though was very disappointing, and hardly enough tables for a busy Sunday morning. The fruit compote was still frozen!

This is a standard Holiday Inn Express - so no frills, though with pleasant enough staff. We've stayed before when visiting Cambridge, so knew what to expect. Our experience this time though was a dissapointment and next time we've already decided to try elsewhere. Key reason can be summarised as 'focus on attention'... First issue was the bathroom - drainage from the sink was agonsingly slow when we arrived on Friday evening... and just as bad Saturday morning. But hotels are like that sometimes. On Saturday evening though the sink started coughing up noodles! Now I'm not formally qualified as a plumber, but I concluded that these two things were related! So this was reported to the hotel on Sunday morning, with a promise that the issue would be sorted while we were out that day. No problem with this - the issue wasn't the hotel's fault... it was the fault of (I assume) the previous occupier who'd either been sick in the sink or put noodles down there! What WAS the hotels fault though was doing nothing about it having promised to do so. I informed the duty manager about this and was informed that there is no housekeeping support over the weekend (so why promise to sort the issue?!) but that he personally would look at the issue when we were out that evening. And he did - and offered to change our room should we wish that. When we arrived back later that though we were really tired, so as the issue was sorted (though there was now some leakage from the U-bend!) we stayed where we were. Another niggly issue was trying to have a cafe latte at breakfast on Day 1. No milk in either of the machines, and no milk in the milk container for cereals which I could have used instead. Now this is a very, very busy hotel, and breakfasts are hectic, so again, this happening is not really an issue. What's more of an issue though is informing staff about this TWICE and nothing being done about it. Eventually enjoyed a latte when we were down town later that morning! What was really not so nice though was checking the room on departure to make sure we'd not left anything, including checking under the bed. I've no idea when it was last cleaned or hoovered, but whenever it was it was certainly a LONG time ago! Lots of fluff, bits of paper and generally a mess. My fault - should have looked on arrival rather than sleep over it for 3 nights! So generally this is a 'standard' Holiday Inn Express, but right now to us comes across as so busy and/or lacking adequate staff levels and/or care that standards are not what they should be. Even when busy and understaffed IMHO there's no excuse for these issues - which is why next time we're trying somewhere else.