by I tend to decline invitations to parties when an overnight stay is necessary. If I’m at the host’s house, it will be awfully late before bed (and I don’t have the willpower to say no to nightcaps). If I stay in a hotel, suddenly everything becomes an expensive mini getaway.
When my niece recently got married, I booked a taxi to get home from the middle of nowhere and it was still half the price of the hotel option. But when I was invited to a fancy dress ball in Dover with a group of my favorite people, I had no choice.
The Premier Inn next to the Eastern Ferry Terminal was a four-minute walk from the party, and a double room was £39, which I couldn’t believe. That’s less than the cost of a full English at Claridge’s. Or a 15-minute Uber when it rains. What could a room be like at that price, I asked myself. There will be dragons here, right? Well, maybe not.
The brand won the award for Best Hotel Chain at Which? Awards (it had topped the list every year since 2015, except in 2020, when Sofitel overtook it and came third this year), and took home the UK’s best budget hotel accolade at the Business Traveler Awards 2023, for the 12th year. in a row. He has fans.
My experience was not just good. I found myself evangelical about the brand and wouldn’t stop talking about it. “Breakfast was less than a tenner and it’s unlimited! All sausages included! And it’s fun too: this week, Premier Inn announced the launch of its ‘bean barrier’ dish, with a lofty motif to stop your Heinz colliding with your egg, and vice versa. An innovation for the modern traveler; a solution to a problem none of us knew we had.
I may be easily pleased, but I can also eat a lot of bacon dipped in ketchup and pressed between two slices of toast. I calculated that if I ate 16 sausages I would get my 2,000 calories for the day, all before 10am and with £10 change.
Everything about my stay at the Premier Inn was positive. Check-in was easy. The room was spotless, with simple decor. It was also twice the size of many wildly expensive luxury city hotels.
Everything looked fresh and white, with nice purple accents and a tasteful striped rug. The lighting was pleasant and everything was functional: reading lights on each side of the bed that worked independently and well-placed power outlets.
Crucially, the bed was perfect. Such is the confidence Premier Inn has in its product that it has a separate website, premierinnathome.com, selling its beds, duvets, pillows (from £36 each) and mattress protectors.
I have encountered this before. I remember being so impressed with a Four Seasons bed in Marrakech once that I did some research and found the brand that sold them online, but a king size bed would have cost me around £3,500.
By contrast, Premier Inn sells its king size beds made by Silentnight for £1,209. Such is the popularity of the name that during last year’s Black Friday sales it sold a duvet and a pair of pillows every 60 seconds.
2022 Which one? Award, the result of a survey of 4,447 members of the organization and the general public, noted that Premier Inn prices had risen an average of 35 percent, but the chain was still the second cheapest in the country, after Travelodge, Its average cost per night is £89.
Digging deeper, the survey showed what appeals most to Premier Inn: it gets five out of five stars for its cleanliness and because the room description matches reality. Guests said they felt quality was “practically guaranteed.” Compare this to the Britannia chain, which came last in the survey for the tenth year in a row and scored two stars in every category, including cleanliness and bathrooms.
Premier Inn is a huge hotel machine and its efficiency makes you wonder why other budget hotel chains get it wrong. Last year it opened a new property in Canary Wharf, with 400 rooms spread over 28 floors; There are currently over 840 Premier Inns in the UK.
It has more than 82,000 rooms and receives around four million guests each month. That means a lot of eggs and bacon are served every day. In fact, about 40 million eggs a year. And a lot of repeated custom. There is also the option of Premier Plus rooms, which have Nespresso machines, chocolate, refrigerator and “state-of-the-art Wi-Fi”. You’ll pay around £20 extra for Premier Plus, but I’m not sure I’d bother when the entry-level offering is perfectly fine as is.
My only experience at a Premier Inn before Dover has been the Brewers Fayre food offering at the hotel next to Margate station. Whenever I visit friends on the coast, I always miss the train home by about two minutes and find myself drinking a large gin and tonic in what is essentially a comfortingly basic and well-upholstered chain pub.
The station cafe is horrible so I’m always glad the Premier Inn exists. It’s a place with mass appeal and immensely appealing to the lone visitor with half an hour to kill, but it doesn’t have the misery-inducing atmosphere of the generic Wetherspoons that open at 8am.
You can also get a large sauvignon blanc for under five dollars. I recently paid £12 in my local pub in Hackney for a glass of something white and tinged with New Zealand currant and I’m still in shock.
It would seem that the reason people like Premier Inn so much is that it does one thing, it does it well and it does it for cheap. There is no pretense that Brewers Fayre is anything other than a functional watering hole. And no one will ever have breakfast in bed at a Premier Inn. It will never be a place for a special occasion.
But at the same time it is the perfect complement for a party. If no one wants to be a designated driver, the Premier Inn is where you want to be at 1am
