Let me start off by saying that this is the crappiest hotel I’ve had the displeasure of staying at in the past 2 or 3 years. And I’ve probably done between 300 and 400 nights in hotels in that time!
Medina Grand, Perth, Australia
I must admit that I have been spoilt by the great hotels that I usually get to stay at; The InterContinentals, Swissotels, Sofitels, Hyatts and Hiltons. So when you end up in a dump you come crashing to earth with a big, loud thud.
I got the feeling early on that this would be an interesting stay, and time only went on to prove how right I was!
So, what happened? It wasn’t just one thing, there were many!
1) The Noise
Man… you couldn’t even hear yourself think! The hotel is built over a bus terminal, and my room just happened to be over the driveway that the buses took to go out onto the street. Just imagine a large, diesel powered bus starting up and driving under your room every couple of minutes! Don’t expect to be able to concentrate on what you are doing.
And no double glazing to reduce the noise either, so when there were 15 minutes of fireworks the other night a couple of hundred meters away at the convention centre, they might as well have been letting them off in the room.
2) The TV
I think we are living in the 21st century now and TV has been around for the better part of 80 years. Unfortunately, the hotel hadn’t quite worked out how to get a decent TV signal into the room. A couple of stations were OK, but a couple would fade in and out, then go to static for minutes at a time. Very disconcerting when you are trying to follow a news story or watch a movie!
But, the piece d’resitance was how incompetently the second TV in the bedroom was wired up. I trundle into the bedroom thinking that I’ll watch the news before I went to sleep. I notice that none of the stations: ABC, SBS, 7, 9 or 10 are working… strange, but one of the channels is showing the “Welcome to the hotel” screen that the TV in the living area was showing when I first came into the room. BUT, no matter which keys I used on the remote I couldn’t watch free to air TV.
I then had a bit of a brainwave… I went back to the living area, turned that TV on and tuned into one of the free to air stations, and lo and behold, the TV in the bedroom switched to the same channel. So, to change the TV channel on the TV in the bedroom I had to go into the living area and change the channel on the TV I wasn’t watching.
Excuse the French, but What The Fuck???
3) The room service
As I said above, I’m used to staying at some reasonable hotels. One of the marks of a good hotel is the quality and presentation of the room service. Given that my colleague was tired and just wanted to chill, I decided to grab a room service burger. I call up room service to order, and wait. Thirty minutes later came a knock at the door and in came my food in Styrofoam containers, yes, you heard me, no messy trays and plates at this hotel, you get your room service in disposable Styrofoam containers!!!!! Classy 🙂
4) The internet connection
And it just got better. When you are paying close on $25 a day for internet access you expect to actually be able to VPN into work, or surf the web at speeds better than dialup… but not at this hotel! Think back to your first 300 baud modem in the 80s, remember how abysmal the speed was, well that 300 baud modem would have been a speed demon compared to internet access at this hotel. You couldn’t even load a web page, let alone replicate our Lotus Notes e-mail.
My colleague spent an hour on the phone to support trying to get his internet connection working. It worked for a while and then went to shit again.
5) The bed
Crap, crap, crap… I turned over in bed and all I could hear were the springs in the mattress crunching and grinding against each other… that’s when you could hear the springs over the sound of the buses and the fireworks.
Oh yeah, and the milk in the fridge was past it’s use by date… but given what else had happened during the stay I didn’t bat an eyelid at it!
I don’t normally write negative reviews, if things are really bad I usually just let it slide and try to forget about it, but the Medina Grand in Perth was so very, very bad, I wanted to make sure that anyone who decided to search the internet about this hotel got this information before they booked.
Myself and my colleague have both decided that we will never stay at this hotel again. If you are thinking about staying here, please, please think very carefully before you book.
In conclustion… never, ever, ever again!