I tend to decline party invitations if they require an overnight stay. If I'm at the host's, it will be perishably late before I go to bed (and I have no willpower to say no to nightcaps). When I stay in a hotel, it has suddenly become an expensive mini break.
When my niece got married recently, I booked a taxi all the way home from the middle of nowhere, and it still cost half the price of the hotel option. But when I was invited to a costume ball in Dover with a group of my favorite people, there was no choice.
The Premier Inn at the Eastern Ferry Terminal was a four minute walk from the party, and a double room cost £39, which I couldn't believe. That's less than the cost of a full English breakfast at Claridge's. Or a 15 minute Uber if it's raining. What could a room look like for that price, I wondered? There are dragons here, aren't they? Well, maybe not.
The brand won the award for Best Hotel Chain at the Which? Awards (it has topped the list every year since 2015, with the exception of 2020 when Sofitel gave it a boost - finishing in third place this year), and received the accolade of Best Budget Hotel in Britain at the Business Traveler Awards 2023, for the twelfth year in a row. It has fans.
My experience was not all good. I found myself being evangelical about the brand and kept going on about it. "Breakfast was less than a tenner and it's unlimited! Including all the sausages!" And it's playful too: this week Premier Inn announced the launch of its 'bean barrier' sign, with a raised motif to prevent you from running into Heinz and vice versa. An innovation for the modern traveler; a solution to a problem that none of us knew we had.
I may be easily satisfied, but I can also eat a lot of bacon, smothered in ketchup and squeezed between two slices of toast. I found that if I ate 16 sausages I would get my 2,000 calories for the day, all before 10am and with change of £10.
Everything about my stay at the Premier Inn was positive. Check-in was easy. The room was spotless, with simple furnishings. It was also twice the size of many extremely expensive luxury city hotels.
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Everything felt fresh and white, with pleasant purple accents and a tasteful striped carpet. The lighting was friendly and everything was functional: reading lights on each side of the bed that worked independently, and well-placed electrical outlets.
Crucially, the bed was perfect. Such is the confidence Premier Inn has in its product that it has a standalone website, premierinnathome.com, selling beds, duvets, pillows (from £36 each) and mattress protectors.
I've encountered this before. I remember once being so impressed with a Four Seasons bed in Marrakech that I did a little digging and discovered the brand was selling them online, but a king-size bed would have cost me almost £3,500.
Premier Inn, on the other hand, is selling its Silentnight-made king-size beds for £1,209. Such is the popularity of the name: during last year's Black Friday sale, a duvet and a pair of pillows were sold every 60 seconds.
The 2022 Which? Award, the result of a survey of 4,447 organization members and the public, noted that prices at Premier Inn had risen by an average of 35 percent, but the chain was still the second cheapest in the country behind Travelodge, the average cost per night £89.
The research showed exactly what appealed most about Premier Inn: it gets five out of five stars for cleanliness and for room descriptions that match reality. Guests said they felt the quality was "virtually guaranteed." Compare this to the Britannia chain, which came last in the survey for the tenth year in a row, scoring two stars in all categories including cleanliness and bathrooms.
Premier Inn is a huge hospitality machine, and its efficiency makes you wonder why other budget hotel chains get it wrong. Last year it opened a new property in Canary Wharf, with 400 rooms over 28 floors; There are currently more than 840 Premier Inns in Britain.
It has more than 82,000 rooms and checks in approximately four million guests every month. That means lots of bacon and eggs served every day. In fact, about 40 million eggs per year. And a lot of repetitive use. The option has also been added for Premier Plus rooms, which feature Nespresso machines, hot chocolate, a fridge and "ultimate Wi-Fi". You'll pay around £20 extra for Premier Plus, but I'm not sure I'd bother if the entry-level offering is fine as is.
My only experience of a Premier Inn before Dover was the Brewers Fayre dinner offering in the hotel next to Margate station. When I visit friends on the coast I always miss the train home by about two minutes and find myself drinking a large gin and tonic in what is essentially a reassuringly simple, well-appointed chain pub.
The cafe in the station itself is horrible, so I'm always glad of the Premier Inn's existence. It's a place of mass appeal and hugely inviting to the individual visitor with half an hour to kill, but it doesn't have the misery-inducing atmosphere of the generic Wetherspoons that open at 8am.
You can also get a great sauvignon blanc for less than a fiver. I recently paid £12 at my local pub in Hackney for a glass of something white and gooseberry-tinted from New Zealand and I'm still in shock.
It seems the reason people love Premier Inn so much is that it does one thing: it does it well and it does it cheaply. There is no pretense that a Brewers Fayre is anything other than a functional watering hole. And no one will ever have breakfast in bed in a Premier Inn. It will never be a place for a special occasion.
But at the same time it is the perfect addition to a party. If no one wants to be a designated driver, the Premier Inn is exactly where you want to be at 1am.
