Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel (recém-reformado) 4 estrelas

First the hotel was clean and most staff were lovely. However the mattress on our bed was awful and I had metal springs sticking into me. Budget hotels get this right, it isn’t a 4 star hotel if you can’t sleep because of a poor bed. Very disappointing Mercure

Good sized rooms, and very clean. Great location. Staff are superb. Really quiet at night, which is rare for a city hotel. We would definitely go back, but I'll bring my own pillows as theirs were a bit lumpy.

Very small room, that’s ok. Clean, compact, bathroom a bit tired. Only hanging space above the kettle. Returning from meal out, 10pm, bar closed. Room service ended at ten. No minibar. Raucous crowd drunk and shouting in reception area, so we did feel quite annoyed at not being able to order a nightcap. Before going out, no lager available in the bar worst pint of Guinness ever, too fizzy and watery. Parking in car park, nail biting. Tightest multi-storey ever! Disappointing service with many visible staff. Never been so disappointed with a mercure, and we have stayed in many over the years.

I rated this hotel 1 star a few months ago following a stay where some of my property was misplaced and the customer service was hysterically awful. In a moment of madness, I decided to book with the Mercure Grand Hotel again for another business trip, foolishly hoping that they’d have bucked their ideas up. Oh, boys and girls, how wrong I was. The experience this time somehow got significantly worse, in that it almost felt like they’d gone to great lengths to make it terrible. Before travelling, and following my bad experience last time, I had asked the manager if there was any chance of a room upgrade. This is not an uncommon request and given I travel to Bristol fairly often, it is something that I regularly ask and often get the luxury of. As per the trend in my previous review, nobody even so much as acknowledged the request even if the answer would’ve been No. Great start, I thought. The bad news continued as soon as I got there. The room stunk and appeared to have damp on first inspection. I went into the bathroom and it was not only unclean, but it appeared that what had once been bath handles and taps had been removed by a Neanderthal and had begun rusting up. Not the worst thing you could see, but just felt so scruffy and lazy for a so-called 4-star hotel. “It’s alright,” I thought, “I’m only here for two nights, it’ll be fine”. Well, I was wrong again. Within an hour of checking in the air con unit had broken - I wasn’t exactly surprised, that thing looked old enough to have blown cool, refreshing air on the ancient Egyptians. And like the ancient Egyptians, I got a bit warm considering this was typically the hottest week of the year. I asked reception if I could move rooms, they said no. I asked them if they could send maintenance out to look at it, they said they’d gone home and they’d look at it the following day. They did try their best to help in the moment and gave me a clapped out desk fan, which was about as effective as a mouse coughing on me. The next day, it didn’t look like maintenance had been anywhere near it. I reckon it was a simple fix but it mustn’t have been deemed important enough to investigate. Maybe breakfast would be the redeeming factor? No. First morning, the machine didn’t appear to have dispensed any coffee into my “latte”, so I took a nice mouthful of hot, frothy milk to start my day. The pastries were dry, the eggs gooey, other bits cold. I am quite a forgiving person and I think returning to the hotel gave them an opportunity to make improvements and show appreciation of their customers’ loyalty. All it did was reinforce the exact reasons why you shouldn’t stay here. The nightly rate is at the level of some of the best hotels in the city and yet this is comfortably one of the worst.

Booked two rooms. Our room was very dusty and I was sneezing as soon as I entered and sneezing all night. Would have asked to change rooms but the extra bed already had been set up & the other booked room was on the same floor. Also, this third floor had pigeons making noise all night & all morning. The hotel was fine. No fridge. Great location though!