Below is the article from Cathy Adams, News Features Editor, Travel, The Sunday Times

Published Wednesday 12 November 2025.

Or use this link to read the article on The Sunday Times website

Is Wetherspoons better than Premier Inn? I stayed the night to find out

Cathy Adams checks in to the group’s Greenwood Hotel, where a room costs £78 and dinner (including wine) in the pub comes to less than a tenner

What makes a good budget hotel? I’ll go: a clean, comfy bed; helpful staff; and no scrimping on the kettle. Ideally it should cost less than £100. Plus feature a mad carpet — at least that’s the verdict of the latest Which? report.

The consumer champion rated Wetherspoon Hotels four stars for value for money, ranking it higher than the crowd-pleaser Premier Inn. One of the 4,631 people polled said that the Wetherspoon hotels were “clean, comfortable and good value”. It’s hard to think of three better adjectives for a hotel room that costs from £49.

The first hotel opened in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, in 1998; by 2016 the group had more than 50 across the UK and Ireland. Keavan’s Port Hotel in Dublin is the largest, with 89 rooms, but in reality most have far fewer than that, thanks to being in historic higgledy-piggledy buildings. Unlike Premier Inn, Wetherspoon hotels have not taken over every A-road and high street. They’re usually in more, ahem, overlooked parts of the UK: Sittingbourne, Andover, Wigan.

I’ve visited my fair share of Wetherspoon pubs up and down the country; I even worked in my home town’s local, the Temeraire in Saffron Walden, Essex, one university summer, where I could earn money while sneaking my friends free drinks. Two decades on I can appreciate their architectural values too, given they’re often in grand old buildings, such as old theatres and former banks. My current local — the Fox on the Hill in Camberwell — has one of south London’s best beer gardens; I was a frequent visitor to Forest Hill’s giant art deco cinema turned Wetherspoons before it closed down a few years ago and have enjoyed too many nights to count in Cambridge’s double-decker Regal. Gatwick’s Red Lion still trousers a sizeable chunk of my holiday budget for mandatory preflight sharpeners. But I’ve never spent a night sleeping in one — well, at least not intentionally.

So this is why I’ve checked into a Wetherspoon hotel for the first time — the Greenwood in Northolt, northwest London, the only one within the M25 — to see if it lives up to Which?’s hype. The first positive is that my double room on a Monday night is £78.30 room only — a weirdly precise number that already makes me feel like I’m not being ripped off. The second, after trudging from Greenford Tube station on a wet evening, is that all I need to do to get my key is to quickly sign a check-in form — and that it can be dropped off in a separate box the next morning. No awkward hanging around reception here.

On this ordinary street in a London suburb, where planes from nearby Heathrow circle overhead, is the L-shaped Greenwood. Unlike many Wetherspoons, it’s always been a hotel: it was built in the 1930s, just before the Second World War, and is now a grade II listed building. Downstairs in the pub, under original high ceilings and an art deco Thirties light fitting, it looks like a typical Spoons — utilitarian brown wooden tables, swampy checkered carpet in the Greenwood’s unique pattern, four fruit machines by the window. Laminated menus are everywhere advertising curry nights, breakfasts and wine from £2.49.

What are the rooms like?
The 12 rooms are above the pub. Mine, 104, is a generously sized corner room, with an aspect over the beer garden and the road (you can’t win them all). There’s so much space. Two stumpy velour wingback chairs with a table sit next to two of the five (five!) windows. Elegant pleated lamps set the tone. There’s a long wooden desk (littered with more menus, entreaties to book direct and the chain’s in-house magazine, Wetherspoon News) and ample wardrobe space. It has the basics right: brushed chrome light switches, double plug sockets with USBs right next to the bed, a temperature control pad that doesn’t require a degree from Imperial. There’s even a framed drawing by a child from a local primary school beside the bed, which is a nice touch, although I’m lukewarm on the pleather headboard in a shade of dishrag. The bathroom is an all-white marble-tiled sort, but it loses marks for the hair and body wash welded to the wall.

Thankfully there’s plenty of tea and coffee, plus sachets of shortbread and even oat milk, and Wetherspoon Hotel guests also get free refills from the coffee machine downstairs (usually £1.29). One big perk is that check-in is from 2pm, rather than the standard 3pm, presumably so you’ll be encouraged to spend longer gently soaking yourself downstairs.

Here I take a booth upholstered in green leather and download the app to order a chicken jalfrezi plus 175ml glass of Coldwater Creek chardonnay for the princely sum of £9.75. Both arrive within eight minutes. I’ve waited longer — and paid more — for a lunch in Pret. Breakfast the next morning isn’t included, but I don’t resent paying £4.18 for a fry-up (fried egg, baked beans, hash brown, tomato) on a blue patterned plate and unlimited machine coffee.

There is one downside of staying above a pub that charges £1.99 a pint: as I’m nodding off there’s a good-natured pub brawl in the garden after kick-out time, which disturbs me despite the decent glazing. But that’s it. I’m with Which? on this one.