New Guide

Making of a winner

The Guide’s editorial team is hard at work researching and writing the next edition. The first drafts have begun to arrive from Lizzy Laczynska, our designer. I know that I am prejudiced, but the new pages with coloured photos of each of our selected hotels look terrific. With one leap, the old guide, with its many traditional virtues, is bounding into the 21st century. 

The new full-colour edition will give a significant boost to sales when it is published in October. That is important because the print edition is at the heart of what we do. The selected hotels and B&Bs that are included in it are there on merit alone. No payment is made. No less important, only those places which have a free entry in the print edition are eligible to appear on the Good Hotel Guide's website.

The other crucial task for us at this time of year is to choose the winners of our César awards, named after the famous 19th-century Swiss hotelier, César of the Ritz. There are so many prize ceremonies these days that they attract a certain cynicism. But the Césars are respected by hoteliers and the media.. The Sunday Times takes the awards so seriously that for the past ten years, it has paid for one of its travel writers to stay for a night and have dinner in each of the ten 10 César hotels. The result is fantastic publicity worth many thousands of pounds and many bookings for each of the winners.
 
How do we select our Césars? It begins with reports from our 15,000 readers whose judgment we know is sound because we have been tracking what they tell us for years. If a hotel or B&B starts to attract exceptionally good reports from readers we trust, we send anonymous inspectors to dine and stay for a night at our expense. Hotels keep their César as long as they remain in the same ownership and maintain their original quality. Our mission is to promote outstanding, independent hotels, inns and B&Bs. Their character, style and cost varies. But the founding editor’s benchmark still sets the standard: a good hotel is ‘where the guest comes first'.

Adam Raphael

Special offers

Election away

Special offers this month are guaranteed to banish pody-election blues. On an idyllic Hebridean island just eight miles long, The Colonsay is offering two nights for the price of one including a full Scottish breakfast throughout May. Golf, tennis and fishing are at hand plus sandy beaches and wonderful walks.

Little Barwick House, near Yeovil, a Georgian dower house, has a two-night weekend break for two (£400), including tea, dinner, and breakfast. The Jurassic Dorset coast is nearby for those who fancy a bracing sea walk.

Combe House, an elegant Grade 1 Elizabethan pile near Gittisham,  is offering a saving of £275 for a four- night stay for the price of three including dinner, bed and breakfast for £412 per person sharing a classic double room mid-week before the end of June.

Looking for a present? La Sablonnerie on Sark, run by Elizabeth Perrée, will sell you a gift voucher which can be anything from a delicious dinner to a champagne celebration with canapés.  Much much more fun than a kettle from a John Lewis wedding list.

.More special offers below, and there are many more are on our Special Offers page.

Hotels, inns and B&Bs with a special offer (click and see)

Send in a Review

Win a free night

No Guide can afford to inspect every hotel every year. If we sent an inspector to spend a night at every hotel in the Guide several times a year, we would need a budget running into millions. That is why we are a Guide for readers written by readers.

The GHG’s reputation for fairness and accuracy depends on a continuous stream of reports. Just a few lines on an email, or on a post card to us at 50 Addison Avenue, London W11 4QP is of great help.  The more readerfeedback we get the better the Guide becomes.

And there is now a valuable incentive. Every review we receive is a potential winner of our monthly competition of a free hotel night for two with dinner and breakfast included.  The winner of the prize for April, kindly sponsored by The Punch Bowl at Crosthwaite, is Robert Gower from Perth. This month’s prize is offered by Augill Castle, an early Victorian fantasy-Gothic castle is in the upper Eden valley. It is a gloriously informal place; not a hotel, more a family home. So please get cracking and click on Send a Review.

Hotel Tales

Basil Fawlty

'There is nothing exceptional about a bathroom that enables you to clean your teeth in the hand-basin or dabble your feet in the shower. Such were the dimensions of this bathroom, you could perform both these ablutions simultaneously while sitting on the loo. No guest with a BMI approaching the amber zone could have hoped to get beyond the door, let alone shut it.'

'Our initial impressions were promising. The owner/manager handled my phone booking very courteously. But there was no sign of him during our stay, during which an efficient but impersonal duty manager presided; our accommodation was distinctly sub-standard. A few days after our return home we received a charming letter from the owner, thanking us for our visit. But we felt he should pay more attention to his guests while they are staying with him, rather than before or after his visit.'

'The ‘single’ room was a distinct disappointment. It was set up for family occupancy, with bunk beds, and a small double crammed in a corner, leaving no reasonable space for anyone to get round it past the elderly TV, or to open or even look out of the window, with its uninviting view of a flat-roofed extension. The poor-looking bedstead was of an unforgiving modern tubular metallic style, its footboard missing a cap and looking capable of jabbing an unwary leg most painfully. The bedclothes looked inadequate for the cold spring weather. The radiator had not been turned on advance, despite our well-heralded arrival time. Rear rooms generally compensate for a lack of inspiring views with peace and quiet, but this was in short supply thanks to a persistently barking dog.'

BUY tHE gUIDE

Plan that spring break

The 2010 edition of the Good Hotel Guide to Great Britain and Ireland is the gateway to your well-earned summer holiday. Discount vouchers worth a total of £150 are included with each copy. They enable a 25% saving off the normal B&B price at participating hotels. A copy of the Guide costs £17.50 (including £2.50 p&p), compared to a retail price of £20.

Click here to buy now!

The Good Hotel Guide, founded 32 years ago, is totally independent. It receives no payments, no hospitality and no advertising from hotels selected for an entry in the printed edition. Hotels pay to be on the GHG website, but only those hotels which have an entry in the printed Guide are eligible. Selected hotels are recommended by readers, backed where necessary by an anonymous inspection. The British edition of the Guide is published each autumn. Adam and Caroline Raphael, who edit the Guide, are award-winning journalists. Caroline, a former BBC researcher and a travel writer, is editor-in-chief. She has worked on the Guide for more than 30 years. Adam, who previously worked for the Guardian, the Observer, the BBC and the Economist, is the Guide's marketing director. Desmond Balmer, formerly travel editor of the Observer, is editor of the British guide. The Guide specialises in small owner-managed hotels, inns and B&Bs in England, Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands and Ireland. It includes budget B&Bs, good value hotels as well as grand country houses and chic city hotels, all offering value for money in their price.range.