Catarina at the front desk does what she can, but she is alone and busy on the phone explaining the rate to a potential guest while several actual guests (including myself) wait to check in.
It’s not their fault, but you’d think a new hotel right next to Brighton’s seafront would do anything to avoid this kind of disruption.
The Maldron opened last month. It has 221 rooms and is just around the corner from the Grand Hotel, long known as the place where Margaret Thatcher survived an IRA bomb attack.
Catarina assigns me a room on the fifth floor. Everything is going well until I inspect the bathroom, which has dirty, soapy water in the sink left by a previous guest.
It’s a blocked drain, so I go back down to Catarina, who gives me a different room on the second floor.
The Inspector stayed at the Maldron, Brighton, a new hotel with 221 rooms, one of which is pictured.
It’s functional, without much imagination. There are kitsch pictures on the wall, which at least give it a bit of colour. When I take a shower and put some soap on my hand, the whole dispenser falls off the wall.
On the plus side (and the reason a fair number of foreign tourists stay there) it’s not a bad hotel at the moment, as there’s a 20 per cent discount on new openings. Overall, the Maldron has all the hallmarks of an airport hotel: big, tiny, brightly lit, anti-theft hangers, awful piped music, authoritative voice in the lift, TV screens in the bar and dining areas.
The feeling is of being about to go somewhere, rather than having arrived.
The hotel is located close to Brighton’s famous seafront (above). After a disappointing stay, the inspector says “it’s a relief to walk along the beach.”
But I enjoy my shrimp tacos and then play it safe with a half-decent burger. Service is erratic. Twice I ask for a glass of tap water, but it never comes and at one point I get up to find a staff member in hopes of getting a second glass of wine.
At breakfast, it’s the same: push-button coffee makers with slow-cooking functions, dusty scrambled eggs, waxed bacon swimming in grease, and infuriating toasters that never do their job.
After all this, it’s a relief to walk on the beach. I guess you get what you pay for.