Premier Inn Eastbourne (Polegate)

The usual good quality hotel room with no frills but as expected. Don't bother with the meal deal. The menu had six choices of main meal of which two were curries and two pizzas. There was no rice! We were offered curry and chips! There was one waitress serving nine people on six tables. It was half an hour between 'main meal' and dessert. I think the poor waitress was cooking it too. The senior managers of this company must be sat back having a laugh. This hotel has the feel of a closing down sale.

Second stay two years apart. This time dreadful. Staff were very good but room was very tired and showing lack of maintenence as was the shower room which had no functioning extractor fan or heating. So very disappointing. Also the restaurant next door has changed hands and is being run by hotel staff. Again the staff were excellent but the menu was awful particularly for evening service. Too few staff. Poor quality food ingredients. So again very disappointing.

Myself and my husband have stayed at Premier Inns on business previously and have always been impressed at the cleanliness and comfort of our rooms, and of the facilities, however on this occasion we were quite disappointed at the general cleanliness of this Premier Inn. The entrance, hallways and stairs looked liked the edges hadn’t been vacuumed for a long time and there was a green piece of paper that was on the first step of the stairs that was there when we arrived and still there four days later. Superficially our room was clean but there was a lot of dust along the edges of the carpet up to behind the the edge of the headboard, which was really dusty. One of the bedside tables had a sticky patch where it hadn’t been cleaned properly for a long time and the headboard had a horrible stain on it that looked like a greasy hair patch. I nearly asked for another room because of this but decided to use a pillow roll from the spare bed to put up against it so that my pillows wouldn’t touch it. The bathroom was very clean however and the bed was super comfy, as with all Premier Inns. The room was very spacious and could have benefited from a coffee table with a couple of chairs in the large empty corner. This would have been great to sit at and relax whilst we waited for the ‘pub/restaurant’ to open at six rather than lay on the bed. The ‘pub/ restaurant’ next door called the ‘Treacle Mine’, which is owned by Premier Inn, doesn’t open until six and has no draught beers but has bottled beers. The menu is very limited and the service is slow. The Mac Donald’s restaurant across the road is very popular with residents. We paid £330 for four nights which we felt was a lot of money for this hotel.

3 or average may be a bit harsh. In truth, we were looked after by friendly staff, slept in a comfortable bed (probably the strongest signature feature of Premier Inns) and had a dinner and (particularly) breakfast which were value for the low prices we paid. Couple of negatives: an odd request on a card in the room to place any recyclable material ‘next to’ the waste paper bin might have been better dealt with by providing an extra bin? The stairs up to our room floor had been incompletely cleaned. Overall, we paid for an unpretentious level of comfort and cuisine, and that was delivered. We would go back.

The hotel was exactly as expected from previous stays but I have marked it down because the hotel had no EV charging units. This is not normally an issue for us but we ended up hiring a car last minute that needed charging up. After a very long journey it was frustrating and disappointing to have to drive around finding an operational EV charging station instead of spending time with our family. The hotel was fine but I’m hoping a less than 5* review might persuade the company to consider installing some.

We received a friendly welcome, he room was clean and at a pleasant temperature, and the bed comfy. However, the room refreshments were very basic and there were no decaffeinated drink options (you had to take these from the dispenser in reception), and some items in the bathroom looked very tired. The room did not have any drinking glasses in it either, you had to ask at reception if you wanted some. When asked about gluten free foods, the receptionist said they had gluten free cereal and bread available for breakfast, but didn't know about any others such as sausages or hash browns. She also said we would have to ask in the restaurant about gluten free options for dinner. The menu in the room did show vegan and vegetarian food options but no gluten free ones. Being a vegan or vegetarian is merely a lifestyle choice, if you need gluten free food it is because you will be ill if you eat gluten, and it is extremely irritating to be given no information on gluten free foods on a menu. The kitchen in the restaurant (in the 'pub' next door) closed at 8.45pm. We would have expected it to close at 9pm and it was annoying that the only hot food option we could see within easy walking distance was McDonalds - which we don't like. We had to make do with cold food from the Asda Express in the petrol station which was a disappointing end to a long day. In addition, the two beer pumps we saw in the 'pub/restaurant' had towels thrown over them indicating they were out of use, so there only seemed to be bottled beer in the 'pub/restaurant', and only one of those was a real ale.