Hotel Room Mann-Ifesto

This month Olly Mann lends some friendly advice to budget hotels on how to improve their service.

- Olly Mann

I’ve been travelling, for work. Staying in a lot of hotels, paid for by my employers; satisfyingly, I’ve now reached the “…and will you be providing a hotel?” stage of my freelance career. But I’m not exactly being put up at The Ritz.

Left alone in a series of dispiriting business hotels, I’ve had plenty of time to consider what might improve my experience. I will now share these thoughts with you. (I could have filled out a customer feedback survey, but this isn’t the first time I’ve abused the privilege of being a published columnist and it won’t be the last, so strap in.) Here are my Olly Mann action-points for improving budget hotels. My Mannifesto, if you will. Let’s hope senior management are reading…

Let me start, as I frequently do, with coffee. Britain is a nation transformed: no longer are we exclusively tea-drinkers, lorded over by those freaky flat-capped cartoon Yorkshiremen, fearful to order a cappuccino lest we seem too Continental. We now expect our hotel breakfast buffets to proffer a range of coffees and they dutifully, uniformly, oblige: filter, espresso, foamed milk. Many hotels even have a branch of Starbucks or Costa in the lobby, so you can depart holding a hot branded beverage in your hands, like you’re Sarah Jessica Parker getting papped in Manhattan. Yet, in the bedrooms themselves, caffeine provision has remained unchanged for decades: a kettle, tea, and sodding Nescafe.