ACJ        Fort William and the Highland Hotel

Wednesday December 28 2005

Last night we returned from a short holiday in Fort William.  It was five days as listed in the Skills brochure.  As is common with holiday brochures, the days travelling are included in the advertised length of the holiday.  Some folk like coach travel, and they enjoy the whole period.  With me I find I get bored very rapidly and object to the food and prices at the stops that the coach makes.  With a couple of gammy feet, the hobble from the coach to the toilets and food hall are a chore.  (Nobody has more gammy feet than me!).

If I travel solo I never ever use a motorway services.  Terrible food at exorbitant prices.  Pubs manage to maintain their carparks and toilets with their income, so why it takes such huge prices to maintain motorway services is a very pertinent question.  I expect it is the usual business ploy of ripping off captive customers.  And as coaches are generally unable to use a pub for a meal break due to the sudden surge of people, the travel companies are forced to use motorway services.  If I'm in the car I head for the nearest town and always find a pub at a convenient point.  I could write a short book on the advantages of a pub over a motorway service cafe, but it wouldn't sell as everyone knows what it would say.

Jacques Chirac was right if we look at motorway-service food.  Heaven help the Finns if their food is worse than ours.  On the way home, at the Old Smithy Restaurant Gretna Green, Beryl paid two pounds sixty for two bowls of dirty tepid water with a small amount of diced carrots and swede at the bottom.  The goo masqueraded as "soup".  The coffee she  bought was very poor too.

The hotel in Fort William was generally very good.  Every member of staff was as helpful as they were able.  Except for the office staff, they were foreigners, but their English was quite adequate and, as I said, they were efficient and polite.

I got exactly what I had asked Skills for: a ground floor room.  But I didn't expect what I got.  As the hotel is built on a hill, there are a lot of steps from the car park up to the reception area.  And the bedrooms were DOWN a lot of steps within the building

The bedrooms were very cosy and warm and the beds were good.  The bedclothes were sufficient for a very warm (not hot) room.  The lighting was good with the bathroom excellent.  The hot water didn't take gallons of wasted cold water to reach a good temperature.

But there were two features that were not at all desirable.  A creaking floorboard in the room above kept me awake with the rooms occupant constantly making the board creak and groan into the early hours.  Also the very modern and smart-looking furniture was very noisy.  The cupboard drawers and the wardrobe door had a autopilot mode where they took over from the user and made a great deal of noise slamming themselves shut,  The wardrobe was particularly bad and the high pitched bang hurt my ears.  I had a row with Beryl as she did it on several consecutive occasions.  I then had to eat humble pie when it happened to me despite me trying to close the door quietly.  The noise was exacerbated by the thin and hard material that the furniture was made of; it looked nice but it acted as a sounding board.

The wing where the bedrooms were, was an annexe to the main part of the hotel.  The manager told me that he understood that the main building was of late Victorian construction and was built as a railway hotel.  A magnificent set of rooms looked to me more like a wealthy person's house.  The public rooms were a trifle chilly (to me) but two open fires more than made up for this petty defect.  The corridor outside the bedrooms was also as warm as toast.  But there were a host of creaking boards in the corridor where lazy tradesmen had skimped re-fixing them after installing cable and other service items.  Having worked in old hotels in Paddington and Bayswater as an electrician in the fifties, I know the "loose floorboard syndrome".  A few more minutes and a few inch-and-a half countersunk screws secures boards properly.  And there is no hammering when they are taken up again again.

The television and "teas-made" facilities in the room were quite good.  There was one evening when we returned to the room and it was close to freezing.  The chambermaid had opened the window, and the room and car park temperatures had stabilised.  And as the car park was much bigger than the room, its temperature predominated.

I looked at the "instruction book" in the bedroom and was surprised to see a disclaimer saying that the company took no responsibility for injury or losses caused by its staff's negligence.  This trick was common in a variety of service industries up to the war, in England, but several bits of legislation after the war made the statement unenforceable in Law.  But perhaps Scottish Law still allows that getout.

As far as I can remember, this is the first Swallow hotel I have stayed in, and as hotel chains tend to be similar due to the controlling hand of the top management, I would expect that others in the chain will be similar.

So dear reader, I have listed the pro and cons of this Swallow hotel, so you can make your choice as to whether you choose Swallow, or a hotel of another chain.  It's an interesting legal point: as I booked through Skills. if the disclaimer by Swallow is legal, would I have a claim against Skills?