What People are saying

Budget - at considerable cost! Avoid if you can!

Nicola Kon 30/08/2013 15:21

We spent only one night here thankfully, arriving late and departing as early as we were able to (we all keen to leave as quickly as we could). On paper it looked to be to be a convenient stop over after the last day of our holiday, en-route back to Eurotunnel from further south.

When we pulled onto a side road where the 'hotel' was situated, we had to stop until a number of gypsy women and their children decided to vacate the road. When we then pulled into the car park, it was teeming with gypsies/refugees (we assumed the former), talking in huddles, playing football and giving us the hard stare.

As it was our last night we had planned to leave as much in the car as possible, excluding any valuables, but we felt such interest for the contents of our car that we emptied everything except clothes and things that were obviously of no value, and lugged them up to our 2 rooms (rooms are up to 3 only and we have 2 children) on the third floor.

The public areas were pretty standard for lemon hotels, though the toilets and shower area were definitely much dirtier than the Lemon hotel in Arques. The odour throughout the place was stale and dirty, and the odour in the rooms was awful - a really nasty dirty cheesy smell. If it hadn't have been so late then we would definitely have left and tried to locate alternative accommodation. There was a lot of activity throughout the night with cars being revved, music blaring out and shouting, screaming and laughter till about 4-5 am. Neither of us (the parents) got much sleep due to this and also due to us feeling that we (and our children) were not particularly safe. We got up at 7, re-packed up the car and scarpered.

The rooms cost us about 60 euros - in the UK this would have got us a clean, safe and reasonably comfortable en-suite family room. Although I wasn't robbed I still feel that I was to some degree, considering that this hostel is marketed as a shared facilities hotel, rather than a long term gypsy/refugee base (the multiple washing lines at the side of the hotel confirmed this assumption)!

In short, avoid if you have any choice!! I have travelled all over the world and stayed in various standards of accommodation, in reputable/less reputable
locations, but I have never felt as unsafe as when we stayed here.

To be honest - I didn't expect a lot from the Lemon hotels we used, they were late night stopovers that happened to be on our route outward/homebound, however, given our experience with this one and the fact that my partner disturbed a group of youths trying to break into a car (or at least take the bikes attached to the back of the vehicle) at the Lemon hotel in Arques, we will be avoiding this chain at all costs on our next trip to France! I'm not sure that you can safely do 'cheap' in France in the same way you can here in the UK with travelodges etc - but maybe this was just our experience!