Mercure St Albans Noke

“Not for the long haul”

I had to isolate here for 3 weeks for work and when I found out it was a Mercure Hotel, I was really excited as I have heard really good things. However, it was not what I was expecting. The room was filthy, the phone didn’t work, and the food was awful. They didn’t seem to have any concept of vege… more

I had to isolate here for 3 weeks for work and when I found out it was a Mercure Hotel, I was really excited as I have heard really good things. However, it was not what I was expecting. The room was filthy, the phone didn’t work, and the food was awful. They didn’t seem to have any concept of vegetarian, veganism, gluten free, alternative milk or nut allergies. I myself am a vegetarian and I notified them of this before arrival. However, more than half of my meals contains meat. When I told the staff this each day, they would apologise agitated and return half an hour later with a cold vegetarian meal. A friend of mine with a nut allergy was given a meal full of nuts, another friend was given soup with part of a corroded whisk in it, oftentimes the food was uncooked, cold or just plain inedible. I have never written a bad review in my life, in fact I often try to see the positives in each place I visit, but seeing that we had to isolate, we relied so heavily on one thing after a long day at work; a nice cooked meal; and that was not what we received. The staff were on the whole very nice and tried to meet the high demands of visitors, but I feel that with the sudden influx of new visitors, they struggled around cope. My room smelt of smoke, there were cobwebs, dust and stains everywhere, and I was constantly having to kill silver fish everyday in both my bathroom and all up the walls of the room itself. That’s not a good sign of a clean dry place. So for all of the above reasons, I would not recommend staying here, nor will I ever be staying here again in the future.

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