Bathroom mould and (presumed) semen stains on the upholstery are (presumably) optional(???) (DaysInn)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	DaysInn
Date:	11/08/09 (46 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Booking process is easy and painless; individual motels easy to contact; some are very good

Disadvantages: Pretty poor standard of accommodation in some - though not all - branches

"These premises have been fully and recently refurbished," is the kind of recommendation for an hotel that's as open to interpretation as those "under new management!" posters you sometimes see adorning inner-city pubs that've recently been set on fire (presumably for insurance reasons).

How bad was the situation before the refurbishment and / or the change of management, is the question you should ask yourself whenever you're confronted with an advertisement of this type. Pretty bad, I'd have to say, certainly in the case of the Days Inn motel Gretna, because whatever it was like before, at the moment it still - quite literally - stinks.

Days Inn is an American motel chain offering budget roadside accommodation, that has branches in Europe as well as the States. As such it's one of the few current competitors to the Travelodge / Premier Inn chain(s) in Britain, and in this country its branches tend to be very few and far between. I know of another at Michael Woods Service Station on the M5 motorway, about 15 miles north of Bristol, and another at the Gordano Service area off the M5 just south of the city. I've stayed at both the aforementioned branches in the past and found the accommodation to be of a good to moderately good standard, so when booking a half-way stay on a trip to Scotland from the south-west last week, I chose the Days Inn at Gretna Green, which is at the Welcome Break Service Area on Junction 21/22 on the M74 motorway.

I booked the room a week beforehand, through laterooms.com and got a £5 discount off a family room (with a double bed and a pull-out settee bed). This cost £55 - which is about average for a roadside motel in this part of the country. The price wasn't including breakfast - this could be purchased for an additional £6 or £7 quid per person from the service area next door, though there was free tea and coffee in the rooms. On the plus side, the booking process was simple and I was able to contact the specific Days Inn branch directly - quite useful as we were delayed setting out and ended up arriving two hours later than our predicted time of arrival, but I informed the motel staff of this beforehand and it wasn't a problem.

The exterior of the Gretna Green branch is pretty shabby as are the public areas, though the staff have done their best to keep these clean. Similarly the rooms themselves though well-maintained do not seem to be in very good nick - the carpet in our room was old and tired, the pictures on the walls looked like they had slight water damage on them and there were small dark marks of something that might or might not have been a human bodily fluid or other excretion on some of the bedroom walls. Happily the bed linen was freshly laundered - and they didn't have one of those coverlets on the bed that you so often see in motels, I mean the heavily-woven jobs that never ever seem to get put in the wash - but the duvet cover had a split seam; even worse the scatter cushions from the bed had dubious-looking white stains on them - not very nice. The en-suite bathroom in our room had been cleaned to a good standard but the fixtures were elderley and the grouting between the tiles had gone black over large areas. One of the communal soap dispensers in the bathroom was empty, and the other was on the point of running out, which given the time of night we arrived would've been a problem, if we'd wanted to wash and hadn't brought our own soap / shower supplies. The worst of it was that the whole bathroom smelt horribly and very strongly stale - with that pervading, sickly smell you get when bathrooms that don't have windows haven't dried out properly. This was unpleasant and very off-putting.

The motel car-park looked justabout full to capacity on the night we stayed, so the place is clearly popular enough but even bearing in mind this is a roadside motel, I have rarely seen such dodgy-looking customers as were hanging around outside not just when we arrived (around midnight) but on the following morning as well. So in terms of other clientele, if you're set on staying at the Days Inn Gretna I'd advise you to pack a personal alarm in your hand luggage. Or maybe some 'Mace' spray - and regrettably I'm only half-joking about that.

In short my experience at the Days Inn Gretna has taught me that though this is a large motel chain with some good branches, the brandname itself is no guarantee of quality. The best thing about staying there was being able to drive away from it sharpish the next morning.

Summary: Buget acommodation sometimes in cheap-youth-hostel-style settings