Hotels and Accommodation

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The Photographs Were Old

I booked the hotel in Alexandria three months in advance because it was cheap, had a four-star rating, and showed a swimming pool in every single photograph.

The location was genuinely perfect – two streets from the sea, near everything. That is the one thing the website did not exaggerate, and by the end of the week it was the reason I forgave the rest.

We arrived at four in the afternoon and could not check in for an hour, because the room was not ready and nobody at reception seemed surprised by this. My brother sat on our luggage in the lobby and read the whole of a newspaper he could not understand.

I had asked for a twin room, because we are brothers and we are both adults. What we were given was a double room with one bed in the middle of it. When I explained the problem, the man behind the desk looked at me for a long moment and then said, kindly, that a single room was also available if either of us preferred. That did not solve anything, but I have thought about it many times since.

The room itself was fine. It was en suite, which I had checked four times before booking, and clean, and the air conditioning worked. It was also directly above the road, and Alexandria at eleven at night is not quiet. It was so noisy that we gave up at one in the morning and went downstairs.

This is where the hotel became good. I went to complain, expecting an argument, and instead a woman on the night desk simply said “yes, that room is terrible”, and let us move to one at the back on the third floor. It was smaller and had a view of a wall and we slept perfectly for six nights.

The facilities, however, were a work of fiction. The swimming pool had no water in it and, according to a member of housekeeping who found the whole subject very funny, had contained no water since 2019. The photographs were simply old. Nobody had lied exactly; they had just never taken new ones.

We had paid for half board and used it twice, because the food two streets away was better and half the price. If you are choosing, take the room with breakfast included and eat everything else outside – that is the only hotel advice I have ever given that people come back and thank me for.

Small things: my key card stopped working twice and had to be reactivated at the desk both times. They took a deposit of two thousand on my card at the start, which came back four days after I got home, exactly as they had said it would.

We had to check out by eleven on the last day but our train was not until seven, so they kept our bags behind the desk and told us to come back whenever we wanted. Nobody charged us anything for that. It is a small thing and it is the reason I would stay there again.