The Lion Head

My bedroom was clean and warm, the staff were kind, and the shared area had useful amenities like a washer and stove. But that was about the only good part. The towel provided was clearly dirty, with hair on it. The Wi-Fi didn’t work at all, and the digital lock password was wrong. The bathroom is shared, so you have to go out to the public area to reach it. The toilet didn’t work reliably, and the tap water was either extremely hot or cold. The shower was awful. The water heater kept fluctuating, and the light turned off automatically. You couldn’t turn it back on without waiting 10 minutes, so you had to shower in the dark. Worst stay I’ve ever had. I strongly wouldn’t recommend this place to anyone for any reason.

The place is very clean, and the location is excellent. There are shops and restaurants nearby, and you can easily walk to a bus or train. The only drawback is the staff availability. They check you in and then leave the premises, only coming back around 4pm. If you need help at night or have an emergency, you can’t rely on them. Apart from that, it would have been a fantastic place to stay.

The price-performance ratio was good, 4/5, but my overall feeling was neutral. Here’s how I rated each category out of 5: - Staff: very kind, 5/5. - Room: relatively clean, with clean towels and bed sheets, but the walls felt a little sketchy and the very old windows were hardly openable, 2/5. - Bathroom: shared, very old, and cleaned twice a day, but it still didn’t look clean. There was often mold on the ceiling, in the corners, in the ventilation shafts in the ceiling, or on the windows, 1/5. - Room view: a dull neighboring house and ugly backyard, 0/5. - Interior age: rather old, 1/5. - First impression from outside: hard to find, with only a very small sign directly by the door saying This is the Lion Head. It didn’t look very appealing, 0/5. - Night noise, 0:00 - 6:00: neighbors pumped water from their building into the public canalizations every night around 22:00 - 0:00. The walls were also quite thin, so you could hear people snoring in the next rooms, 1/5. My calculation scheme was: (2*Staff + 3*Room + 3*Bathroom + room-view + Interior age + 1st outside impact + 2* noise level at night + 2*price-performance ratio) / 15 In total: (2*5 + 3*2 + 3*1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 2*1 + 2*4) / 15 = 30 / 15 = 2.00 The result was rounded in the default mathematical manner.

The cracked windows were simply taped over when we asked the man to fix them. :) The room stayed very cold even with a heater, and constant noise from outside kept disturbing us. The place is right by the street, and we woke up all night to police cars rushing past. We’d booked it for 180 EURO a night but ended up paying 180 POUND, which was 40 EURO more than we first expected. Don’t go there.