I hope that you’ll join me this week in putting your (unwashed, preferably) hands together for Bart Cronin, owner of the Nanford Guest House, Oxford. Last year, Cronin’s establishment came second in TripAdvisor’s league table of the dirtiest hotels in Britain. This year he has improved matters; this year, he came first.
I’m liking Bart’s style. Not for him the ignominy of settling for silver. “Only second?”, you imagine him crying, banging a fist on his minty reception desk. “If they want filth, I’ll give them filth.”
What he actually said, when asked about the litany of complaints on TripAdvisor – for example, the entrance hall stank of wee and the beds had ticks – was, basically: “What do you expect for £20? If you want luxury, go elsewhere.” And the question is – might he have a point? After all, when a hotel in a very expensive city costs £20 including breakfast, wouldn’t a teensy alarm bell ring? And when you checked and found the local council didn’t recommend it, and then looked at TripAdvisor – because everyone does – and saw someone had written “You’d be better off on the pavement”, would you think, “Yep, let’s give that one a whirl”?
But then I suppose it depends a) how dozy you are, and b) how much you take TripAdvisor as gospel. I think we all agree it makes pretty gripping reading, particularly the bad reviews. Stained headboards, pubic hair-flecked sheets? It’s like an unputdownable book. Why buy a guide when free, online, you get uncensored grime-porn? But what to think about the dazzlingly good reviews? I know people who would never book a hotel unless it was liberally praised on TripAdvisor. I know others (me) who are more cynical. It’s not just because of that incident when a gushing appraisal of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, Loch Ness, turned out to have been posted by the hotel’s owner. No, it’s more a faint suspicion of those who are so quick to proffer their feedback.
I admire the generosity of spirit that underpins TripAdvisor. Trouble is, such free-for-alls can become a pedants’ forum. A mouldy shower is one thing, but what sort of person remembers that “the lifts were rather slow”? Professional bores, that’s who – the type of guests that you would jump over a wall to your possible death to avoid on holiday. Why listen to them now?
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Spend too long on TripAdvisor and you may suffer information overload and a distrusting mind. Are 45 mediocre reviews better than one good one? Might that assassination of the hotel manager have been written by his ex-wife after he was found humping a chambermaid? Who knows?
So, maybe the Nanford Guest House isn’t so bad in reality. Maybe I should eschew hearsay, book in and find out for myself. Yes, I’ll do it later. Like, when hell freezes over.