The dull London hotel that’s been voted the ‘best in Britain’
Here we go again. Another year, another bizarre list from Tripadvisor. The world’s largest travel guidance platform has revealed the winners of its annual Travellers’ Choice Best of the Best Hotel Awards, celebrating this year’s highest rated hotels worldwide, according to the platform’s global users.
Of course, preferring one particular hotel to another is largely a matter of personal taste but if the florid, French-inspired Hotel Colline de France in Gramado, Brazil is the best hotel in the world, the garish Toulson Court in Scarborough is the UK’s best B&B or the Resident Covent Garden its top hotel, then it’s time for me to hang up my room key and check out.
Do you use Tripadvisor? I must admit that I don’t, except very occasionally to check whether a hotel I know little about is broadly acceptable or not. Positive reviews indicate that a place is well run but the opinion of countless strangers who don’t even reveal their real names is hard to truly trust and what they appear to love, I might dislike and vice versa.
They sure do love the Resident Covent Garden. The hard-to-spot entrance to the best hotel in the United Kingdom is squeezed between a food and tobacco kiosk and a branch of Greggs at the corner of the Strand and Bedford Street, which leads into Covent Garden. I’ve never liked the Strand, a bleak, unlovely thoroughfare hurrying towards Trafalgar Square, though Covent Garden of course makes a great base for a central London hotel.
There’s nothing memorable about the Resident, looks-wise. Grey is the predominant colour – grey lobby, grey corridors, grey-walled boxy bedrooms with grey curtains devoid of personality save for a throw, a few blue and red cushions on the beds and exactly the same abstract print above them. If the hotel were being judged on looks alone, surely it couldn’t be considered the best in Britain, even allowing for vagaries in taste – the idea is just too far-fetched to contemplate.
The same goes for facilities: this is a hotel with no restaurant, no breakfast room, no gym, no lounge, just 57 bedrooms ranging from not large to very small in size. All the rooms are the same, each with an integrated mini-kitchen (microwave, sink with Brita filter tap, kettle, Nespresso machine, tea and coffee); smart grey marble-tiled bathroom; high quality pocket-sprung bed with good linens; smart TV; and a circular dining/work table with two chairs and an Anglepoise lamp by Paul Smith. My King room had a wall of windows overlooking the Strand. I used a chair for a bedside table and regretted the row of plugs and sockets that marred my view of the wall opposite.
Can this really be the best hotel in the whole of the United Kingdom? Does charm, character, history, a beautiful location count for nothing? As for value, while the hotel’s standards, including cleanliness, are high, and hotels in London are more expensive than ever, there are other similar properties in the area that come at a lower price and even Tripadvisor fans mark it slightly down on value for money. I think two elements though (none of the aforementioned, obviously) have raised the Resident to this pinnacle and one of them, its staff, is impressive.
The first reason may lie in the hotel’s engagement with Tripadvisor. If you look at its website, you’ll see that the home page immediately trumpets its high ranking; if you look at its listing on Tripadvisor, you’ll see that every review posted receives an appreciative reply from the hotel. Some hotels care about Tripadvisor and its algorithms more than others; those that do, like the Resident, tend to attract more reviews and score more highly.
If the hotel itself is bland and rather dull, its secret of success stands in a smiling row in the lobby: the front-of-house team, who inject warmth, personality and a genuine desire to help to an unusually high degree. David Orr, the chief executive of Resident Hotels, has plenty of experience injecting the human touch into no-frills, affordable hotels, starting in 1999 with City Inns which became Mint Hotels, and in 2020 launching Resident (formerly Nadler) in Covent Garden, Soho, Victoria, Kensington, Liverpool and in the summer, Edinburgh.
Patricia Segurola, the ebullient general manager, heads a team that is not only immediately, reassuringly, genuinely friendly but also a mine of information about London – culture, nightlife, restaurants, bars, shopping and so on – even taking an in-house “inside knowledge” exam during their training. Most guests are tourists, many from the US, but the team of 13 does its best to help them feel, as the hotel’s name suggests, like residents during their stay and to make up for the hotel having no restaurant of its own.
Every early evening, Segurola hosts complimentary drinks in the lobby where guests can meet and chat. “Some have no plans for visiting London,” she tells me. “If they want, we can help them make one.” If Segurola ever leaves the Resident (she’s been there since the start) she could always get a job as a concierge at the Ritz. They don’t wear fancy uniforms and gold keys on their lapels, but the staff here are genuinely impressive. “It’s all in the recruitment,” says Segurola. “It’s so important to choose people who can listen, communicate and who really care. Then we can train them up.”
There’s a short breakfast delivery menu from Soho Coffee Co for those like me too lazy to use their mini kitchens – and if you don’t want what’s on the list, they’ll go and get you what you do want. Someone on the front desk heard me mumble as I was filling in the form that there was no croissant on the menu. I ordered just coffee to be delivered at 8am but when it came, miraculously, there were two delicious croissants from a local patisserie too. Such gestures are what make superb hotels, but the best in the country? I don’t think so.
Fiona Duncan was a guest of the Resident Covent Garden (020 3146 1790), which offers doubles from £309, not including breakfast.
