Milton Keynes Central (Theatre District) hotel

Fantastic position with lots to do around it. Good price too. We booked this hotel last minute but still managed to get a good price. Very easy to get to though car park is small so be prepared to do a 20 point turn to get out of there's no spaces. That said, there is a council run car park in front of it with loads of spaces and free overnight. We arrived late and left early so didn't use the bar or restaurant so can't comment on those. Room was the usual Premier Inn standard so good and clean as was the bathroom. However.....the air conditioning control panel was broken, especially the bit you pressed to turn the temperature down so with 3 of us in the room we sweltered all night and none of us got much sleep. It would have been nice to have had a fan in there or something to say it was broken when we checked in. This was Room 115. When we left the room in the morning, it felt very chilly in the corridor compared to the sauna in the room. I did not get the chance to report this when we checked out as there was no one on reception and we had to leave as we had a long drive ahead of us through rush hour traffic. That said, I'm sure it was just an isolated problem with one room which wouldn't stop us using the hotel again due to its great positioning.

The parking is advertised on their website as 'We offer an exclusive guest parking discount of £7.90 per 24 hours. Simply find a space and pay less to park. This car park is managed by Horizon Parking', however parking is limited to the first 2 rows and the rest does not fall into this category. It is extremely limited due to the size of the hotel. After arriving after a long day we discovered this which we didn't initially think was an issue until you discover that you can only pay for the parking on the day outside of the Premier Inn offer. Therefore, we were advised by the staff that we would have to wake up before the charges started at 7am to pay for the parking. After a long drive, this wasn't ideal. I raised this with this customer support team who are simply not interested and I was advised that you should always call the hotel to check on the parking situation before booking!!! Therefore, I wouldn't recommend this hotel unless you're planning to get up early anyway. We did use Premier Inn frequently but will be going elsewhere in future due to how they handled/ didn't handle our issues.

I’ve been staying at the Premier Inn for a while and have had an exceptional experience by all the staff there. Emily has been incredibly helpful and always ready to sort out any issues promptly. I highly recommend staying here!

I shall keep this fairly brief for one of my reviews; Parking outside the hotel There are just two rows of parking spaces outside the front of the hotel, and even these can be used by members of the public and those visiting nearby businesses, so it really is pot-luck if you get a space. Luckily we did manage to grab one when someone left the beauty salon, and using the provided QR code from the reception desk, managed to get 24 hours parking at the reduced rate. Check-in As mentioned in other reviews the check-in machines did not work, even though it found our booking, it would not let us check-in and threw up an error. Thus we then had to wait in a queue to be seen by the receptionist, who said that it was because our room wasn’t ready (even though it was 3pm) and had to manually reallocate us a room and provide us with an additional towel. Lift The second lift is still out of order, so there is only one lift available which is very slow. Room This was the usual Premier Inn room with a king size bed and the sofa by the window. The ensuite was generally clean and worked well (although im not sure the extractor fan did much). The aircon kept the room cool, especially with it being 29 degrees outside. There were loud music noises coming from the nearby festival in the park, but luckily it wasn’t too loud to keep us awake all night. The real issue with the room we stayed in was that it had an interconnecting door which was unlocked, thus it would have been possible to enter the adjoining room. We therefore used the sofa to wedge it against the door to try to keep out any potential intruders. I am sure if we had contacted reception they would have sorted this out, but this should have been attended to by housekeeping. Breakfast We had pre-booked breakfast when we booked our room, so wandered down to the restaurant at 9am. The lady manning this meal time was obviously trying to do her best at seating guests, refilling the drinks and buffet, as well as clearing tables, but really needed additional pairs of hands. The buffet breakfast element was ok, with a lack of muffins, different flavoured yoghurts and empty fruit juice dispensers. The cooked food once obtainable was hot and tasty, but it was the fact that each item available was served at a different time, so you did have to wait a while to ‘collect the set’. Overall this ‘hotel’ did what we needed it to do, but if we had not managed to get a parking space this would really affect our decision whether to stay here again.

The experience was awful, we booked 2 nights but left after 1 night. The check in took forever as the machines weren't working and the guy was very slow. The restaurant was closed on the Saturday night and there was a disco happening in the cocktail nearby and we couldn't sleep as the music was so loud and went on until 3.30am!