A great 'prison' city centre hotel (Malmaison Hotel Oxford)

Member Name: vcannon85

Product:	Malmaison Hotel Oxford
Date:	08/03/09 (100 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Location. Clean and large rooms

Disadvantages: Requests not fufilled. Noise from outside,

I stayed at the Malmaison in Oxford on February 8th 2009 as part of a Christmas present for my boyfriend, and I would just like provide a little bit of feedback.

I booked the room through laterooms.com in November 2008. I communicated with the hotel a bit prior to my arrival, with regards to champagne in the room on arrival. The hotel was fairly efficient to responding to my requests, however the initial enquiry was quite slow, and I had to send my original e-mail twice.

Upon arriving in Oxford, we searched for the hotel by road, and I think we must have driven past four times, before we finally saw it, then panicked as to whether we could drive up the driveway, as it looked like a pedestrian only walkway.

We arrived earlier than the check in time, and we did not expect our room to be ready, but we wanted to drop off the car. The receptionist was extremely friendly, and informed us that our room was not ready, during our check in our room became available, and we were pointed in the direction of our room.

We found our room, which was really nice; I immediately fell in love with the bathroom with its roll top bath. However I did notice that the champagne and strawberries that I asked to be in the room were not in there. I telephoned down to reception, and asked that the half bottle of house champagne to be bought to the room as we were just on our way out and I wanted it as a surprise for my other half.

The room itself was very clean, and I was most impressed. The only little downside, was the recycled pencil in the room, which had been chewed at the end, resulting in no rubber and a very badly dented metal top that you would expect to find in a primary school.

We spent a few hours looking around Oxford centre, and then returned to our room, finding that our key card would not work, so we had to go back to reception, get our key reset so that we could enter the room. Not a huge problem, however the lift was not working.

Once back in our room, we found the champagne in a ice bucket (with not a lot of ice), however it was a full bottle of champagne, instead of the half asked for, I didn't want to send it back and request only a half, due to the embarrassment factor I thought I might receive, it wasn't so much the money point of view, more to the fact that we were going out shortly afterwards and didn't want to waste it, and an extra £20.00 or so that it cost does soon add up.

Upon our return to the hotel in the evening, we settled down for the evening, however we couldn't sleep for a while, due to loud music being played, we were not entirely sure where it was coming from, possibly from the restaurant downstairs, but it was around 11.30pm, which I thought was a bit late.

The next day on check out, we awoke; unfortunately we didn't experience breakfast as we woke up too late. We went to reception and checked out, this was all very smooth. I did not want to mention the champagne to the receptionist, as I know we had drunk it, and thought it would be easier to pass the comments directly via an e-mail.

All in all a very pleasant stay, but I just feel that in the future, any requests that have been made by a guest should be completed before the guest is shown to the room.

I plan on returning to Malmaison later on this year, hopefully in the Mallard Suite at your Reading hotel, and I hope that any requests that I make will be fulfilled.

Summary: A great hotel, perfect location