AIF                 A slow-moving trauma in Blackpool        29 Dec 2007
                                                                                                                                Updated 30 December 2007 

This is a tale of a Christmas Holiday that wasn't quite what I expected.  I'll explain.

Skills Coaches is a Nottingham Coach Company that I have used in the past and have been very satisfied with what they have provided.  In fact I have had such good service from them that they are close to the top of companies I would recommend.  You can tell a good company by how they handle an unlucky situation.  Most companies are reasonable until a problem arises.  Give them a problem like a coach breaking down in Belgium, and you find out whether they are worth going back to.  Skills certainly handled that problem superbly well.  But they have slid down the ratings by choosing the Norbreck Castle Hotel in Blackpool.  Perhaps the rep who chose the hotel was a lot fitter than me and it didn't cause him/her any problem. Perhaps they had done the Nottingham Marathon and found that this hotel was no effort. But it caused me a lot.  Read on:

I got a taxi from the house to Collin Street.  This is a street in the City where almost all the coach pickups are from.  I would suggest that the Council should look again at that spot because it is a nightmare returning there when you try to get a taxi back home   It's a terribly busy road and coaches arrive in droves making it close to impossible  for a taxi to get to where the people are standing.  I'll be making a  suggestion to the Council for their future planning.

But it is the Norbreck Castle Hotel that is the cause of my complaint.  It's not the staff or the fellow guests, but the top management decisions.  I'll relate my experience so that a reader can see the problems I had.  I have two very gammy feet and find walking an extreme chore. So the hotel was not the best for me.  But many other folk I spoke to agreed that the building was FAR TOO LARGE TO BE A HOTEL.  Had it been broken down into four separate hotels, it would have been reasonable.  I was told that the building was once a family home of a wealthy man.  He must have been very very wealthy indeed, as it is one of the largest buildings I have ever seen outside of ones like railway stations.  I reckon that it is longer than Buckingham Palace, and that place is pretty large.  Looking at it with Google Earth doesn't really convey its size.  You need to be in a coach on the road outside to get its measure.  It's not quite horizon to horizon, but it feels like it when you are walking from one end the the other.  There are bigger buildings, I must agree, but they tend to be used as aircraft hangers or football stadia.

One is seldom in a good mood after a long coach journey because the only places they can stop at are motorway services.  And after you have been fleeced at prices like two pounds for a cup of bewitched water that they call tea, you leave the coach wanting a rest of body and mind.  You can get an easy chair or settee in the foyer and all the rooms were quite good with the usual tea and coffee facilities that most hotels have these days.

I asked for a ground floor room as I have difficulty climbing stairs.  Skills say they will request things like this but CANNOT guarantee them.  In this case there were none, so I was unlucky.  We were given a letter laying out everything that was going to happen during the four days stay.  I was allocate Room Number 093.  It meant going up in a tiny lift to the first floor, walking along a long series of corridors and negotiating fire doors.  You then climb a thirty foot (shallow) ramp.  Along more corridors. Descend a flight of stairs and eventually  reach the room.  It was obvious that the two hundred year old building had had a lot of wear since its conversion.  Everything worked  ---  just!  The room was passably warm but the bathroom was like a cold-store.

On the way to the dining room from the bedroom a woman from the reception staff  saw me struggle up the stairs and said to me that she could change my room for one that avoided the stairs.  I gratefully accepted.  I was moved to Room 103.

The trek to the dining room was the next trauma.  The building is about a quarter of a mile long and our room was at one end with the dining room near the other end.  The wife and I finally arrived at out designated table.  Murphy's Law, of course, dictated that we would be at the opposite side of the dining room to the entrance door.  The brochure mentioned "buffet" in several places.  This translated into a canteen style queue-up and serving yourself from the table.  When one waiter saw my plight he offered to carry my plate to the table.  The food was good although it could have been a bit warmer.

But the dining room itself was the most notable part of the experience.  An enormous cavern similar to Waterloo Station Concourse, and about as high.  Another difference is that Waterloo Station was, when I knew it, rather quieter than this dining room.  The buzz of conversation was so loud that it was difficult to talk to the person alongside you at the table.  I suppose the huge cavern echoed because it appeared to be a concrete ceiling.  Acoustic tiles may have reduced the noise a little.

Of course, it had to be large to seat a thousand people at one sitting.  Yes, I said 'a thousand people'.  Four hundred rooms with a lot of children on top of the adults, must have been close to that figure.  Each circular table seated twelve people.  Work out how many tables.  I reckon that there were about twenty waiters all told.  No wonder it was self-service!  But the waiters did their best, scurrying back and forward like rabbits with a stoat in pursuit.  At those meals where the food was brought to the table, the waiters only carried two plates at a time.  You can imagine the delay.  With a dining room so large and so few staff, a conveyor belt would have been more appropriate.

 "The entertainment" started at the end of the meal.  You know the principle: if the singer can't sing, turn up the volume so that the punters cannot can't tell the difference.  It became a deafening din.  And I didn't pack my ear-defenders!  I left most of a cup of (good) coffee to escape the din.  It literally was painful; like being close to a pneumatic drill in operation.  Had it been an industrial site, I think the HSE would have taken an interest.

The very long room that needed to be traversed to get from the reception area below our room to the dining room, had a bar and easy chairs.  I was disappointed at the bar.  They had no sweet sherry.  They had no port either.  I had a half a larger at one pound forty.  It's about one pound ten here in Nottingham for a half a pint of Fosters.

The Christmas Eve evening meal was 'special'.  I went at the earlier time given in the letter "6.30 for 7.00 pm sharp".  The queue to get into the dining room was enormous.  I sat on a chair to one side and watched the queue slowly make its way into the cavern.  I said 'a thousand people' earlier.  I didn't count them, but the queue went on and on and on.  I joined the queue as it's end passed me sitting close to the entrance door.  Another reminder of Catterick Camp in 1944 when I was in the Royal Signals, only our regiment was not as large as that.  The army food wasn't bad at Catterick or at the hotel .  But I was rather fitter in 1944, so route marches were tolerable then.

On Boxing Day I decided I'd had enough.  I went to the reception desk and spoke to a man and said "can you get me a taxi back to Nottingham.  It won't be cheap, but I've had enough."  He seem appalled.  Whether it was the possibly bad publicity of having a guest walkout and pay a hundred and fifty pounds to to get away from the place, or whether he was genuinely concerned for me, I don't know.  He quizzed me for several minutes re my concerns.  He then said that he would investigate getting me a room closer to the services.  He told me later that he had tried The Savoy as they were part of the group, but they were full.  So was The Britannia, although that was a huge hotel as well.  But he had found a fourth floor room in the Balmoral Wing that was close to another lift, and the lift was close to the dining room.  I agreed to be moved to that room.  I noted that the wear and tear in this Room 456 was less than it had been in the other two rooms.  I think that that wing was pricier than the first one I was in.

The final day at breakfast found that the food station near our table had disappeared.  I discovered where the cornflakes-table was situated and had a few of them under milk.  The other food tables were simply too far away to hike over to them to get scrambled egg and bacon.  Coffee was in the beakers at the table.  Quite good coffee too.

Our cases were collected from outside the room on the day we left.  I had to hike back to reception area to wait for the coach.  It arrived on time and the cases were loaded and we boarded.  The coach left.  Half a mile from the hotel the driver announced that due to a coach breakdown at the interchange point, we would have to hang around to kill two hours.  He drove us to The Tower and announced that he would be back there in an hour.  People could get off and "see the town".  About half the passengers disembarked and we drove off.  We meandered through the town and ended up at a coach park well out of town.

Most Skills' coaches have a tea-making facility; this one did too.  But all that it provided us was a constant rattle (like a demented tambourine) where the metal parts of the cup-holder clattered metal-to-metal as every bump in the road.  The driver disappeared.  The cynics among us assumed he knew where a cafe was situated.  About forty minutes later he returned and we left the coach park.  We made our way back to the centre of town and at first appeared to be going back to the hotel.  But when he did a total U-turn at a roundabout I worked it out that he couldn't turn the coach in the middle of town and wanted to be facing the same way as when he disembarked the passengers by The Tower.  Everyone got on except for two people.  We waited a long time and I killed the time by watching the sea across the road.  It was high tide and rough, with spray washing the pavement at every wave.  The few people that were about were not on that side of the road.  Presumably they had their bath on a different day!

It appears to be policy for the coach to wait for a reasonable time before abandoning people far from home.  I suppose they get less law-suites that way!  Eventually the elderly woman and her daughter arrived.  The local grape vine in the coach told us that she had contracted diarrhoea, and the two decided to book into a nearby hotel and get a taxi the next day.  They would claim on their insurance for the monetary loss.

We drove off and encountered a huge amount of traffic on the motorway.  We did about fifteen mph for thirty miles or so.  The streaming rain and cold outside made the windows such that it was impossible to read many of the road signs even though we were on the nearside of the coach. I did make out a sign saying we were on the M62 at one time.  The driver, like all Skills' drivers was good.  The weather was foul and his driving was appropriate.  I've never been in a Skills' coach that had to make an emergency brake.

We eventually arrived at Woolley Edge Services.  Another cup of bewitched water at a cost of two pounds.  The Danish pastry was excellent.  I told Beryl who acts as runabout for me. Her reply was that "It should be at that price!".  There are times when I could strangle her, but most of the time she is a wonderful wife.

We eventually arrived home via a taxi from Collin Street, and had a decent cup of tea.  Next year intend to see what Nottingham has to offer over Christmas.  We may use Skills again during the summer.

Updates
30/12/07
Since writing the above, I tried to find something about Norbreck Castle.  I tried Googling the name and found a picture of the hotel seen from a short distance out to sea.  Take a look at:
http://www.chromasia.com/blog/archives/0712041828.php and the pale yellow building and the two towers are the hotel.  You can see what I mean about the size of the place

31/12/07
I can't remember seeing other than the two small lifts.  I do remember a lot of people couldn't wait and used the stairs at both the southern end first floor and the northern end fourth floor.  Two small lifts for a thousand people seems to me to be a bit under-provisioned; they were certainly always busy when I was near them.

05/01/08
An interesting development:  I had a letter today from the Customer Service Manager of Skills.  The lady has looked at this blog and said that Skills would take my comments into consideration; and I do believe her.  But another interesting thing has emerged; there was no breakdown at the interchange.  I wonder how the coach driver will explain his actions.  There's a lesson to be learned: "Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out !"  Here endeth the lesson.