Inverness Centre (River Ness) hotel

Our experience at this Premier Inn was poor. We paid extra for a ‘Premier Plus’ room, which was anything but!! Only positives were the location, room size and bed comfort. Many of the negatives were as follows: * Toilet paper very thin/poor quality. * Not enough hangers. * No tissues or toilet brush provided, which are normally basic essentials in hotel rooms. * Ultimate WiFi didn’t always work as advertised & standard WiFi very slow. * Windows/outer decking very dirty - extremely poor when we paid extra for a river view, which we then couldn’t enjoy due to how filthy the windows/decking were. * Staff availability - at busy times, there was only one staff member dealing with enquiries which caused delays. Each time we went to Reception, there was nobody on the desk and they did not always respond quickly to the buzzer. For the hefty price tag of our stay, I would expect someone on the main desk at all times. * Poor cleanliness standards - items in room were dusty/dirty (extractor fan, stool). * Stupid rules whereby if you wanted the room serviced, you had to go to Reception to queue up and let them know! This delayed the start to every day of our stay, and was an unnecessary & pointless stipulation. * Housekeeping service was poor. Our bin wasn’t emptied, resulting in lots of food/drink rubbish piling up in the room. We complained to staff at the time, and were told housekeeping were short-staffed! FYI, not my fault! That’s your problem to sort! As the hotel, you know how many guests are staying, and that they expect a housekeeping service included within the price. As paying guests, we spent hundreds of pounds on our stay, and for that we definitely expect someone to pull their finger out and empty the damn bin! Disgusting lack of service and pathetic excuses. Our main issue was the toilet, so it gets its own paragraph. It wouldn’t flush properly and there was clearly a fault with it. We spoke to Reception around 10pm the first evening - a male staff member came up to the room to investigate. He advised we pour water from the kettle into toilet bowl to help it refill and flush - this worked intermittently as a short term solution, but obviously far from ideal. We asked for maintenance to look at this and fix the toilet properly. We were told that maintenance only work 9am to 5pm, so would have to wait until next day. I was very unhappy about this. We were offered to use the toilet in an empty room next door, which was not a proper resolution. Did not want to move rooms due to inconvenience. Spoke to a different staff member the following morning - she misunderstood & thought it was the toilet in the room next to ours which had an issue! When we returned to hotel later in the day, we had to queue at Reception (again!!) to ask if our toilet had been fixed - the staff member was gormless, he had no idea what we were talking about and hadn’t been given any information about our issue. Complete lack of communication, which was very unprofessional and incredibly frustrating. To this day, we still don’t know if our faulty toilet was actually looked at by maintenance or not. It continued to not work properly for duration of our stay, which was disruptive and caused us unnecessary stress. This multitude of issues impacted negatively on our entire stay. We definitely did not get a ‘premier plus’ experience that we had paid a lot for. The price tag to stay here for a few nights was disgusting, and they should be ashamed charging guests that much when basic facilities (toilet!) don’t work properly! We complained when checking out, but didn’t receive a proper apology and got quite a defensive attitude from the staff member (oh I wasn’t here that day so I didn’t know anything about that etc). We contacted Premier Inn directly afterwards, to make a formal complaint. They were not quick at getting back to us; it took the mick that they took a week to respond and even that was just a holding reply. We managed to claim a partial refund, but the price we still paid for our stay was shocking and unacceptable. I will not return to this Premier Inn and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone staying in Inverness!

Seriously awful Stinks of damp - first room unusable owing to stench. Restaurant has nobody in it but too busy to serve Avoid

The hotel is extremely well located. The rooms are spacious and very comfortable. The shower is great and the bed excellent. What impressed us most was the staff — outstanding service both at check-in and throughout our stay. A special mention to Joss, who went above and beyond to help us with a few issues during check-in, always with genuine kindness and attention.

We selected an accessible room, and this is one of the best accessible rooms we have found. The bathroom sink was lower, and there were well-placed grab bars for the toilet and shower. The bed was also lower and easier for the guest in a wheelchair to get in and out of. Plus plenty of room to wheel around I would highly recommend it for anyone seeking a wheelchair-accessible room in Inverness.

Staff not approachable, room 303 next to dual carriageway. Waitress at breakfast was friendly though and hard working