The Alton House Hotel - Alton, United Kingdom 

I stayed at this hotel with my partner as part of a group of people attending a 'murder mystery' evening on Saturday 3rd May in honour of a birthday. We arrived early and had a few drinks at the hotel bar. plesant enough serving staff - although they all very young and didn't really come across as very customer service orientated but did the job! When we dropped our bags into the room we commented on how lovely it was, very spacious etc and continued to go back down to enjoying the day / eve with lots of murder mystery fun. However: When it came time for us to go to sleep came the issues. It being a Saturday night at 11:00pm, the 80 strong crowd of muder mystery revellers left the conference room, and headed straight for the hotel bar - Fine. Not so fine was that our room was directly above the bar!!! It was awful, and sounded like the people might as well have been in the room with us! We tried to sleep for a good 45 mins and went on until 1:20 before deciding enough was enough. We walked downstairs and asked for the manager - It was an older man who was clearly the night porter who we asked if we could be moved as we were unable to sleep. He said that he would keep serving drinks as long as people were buying them as 'they were spending good money' We reminded him that we had also done that by paying for our room. Various other excuses like ' I have lots of glasses to wash' ensued until the conclusion came that there were no free rooms. We maintained that we were not at all happy with this and how would we get to sleep, to which he said he would stop serving people shortly and we should see the manager in the morning about getting some of our money back. I'd mentioned that this was not really expected from something classed as a 3 star hotel. Having gone back up to our room the noise kept going for another half an hour whilst we turned the TV up to try and drown it out. Next morning I asked for the duty manager on check out to ask if anything could be done. She said she could not do anything re knocking money off as the monies for the room were paid to the murder mystery group. I told her I understood that it was Saturday night, but that they should not be letting out a room with thin ceilings directly above the bar if you are going to fill it out until the wee small hours (granted it was Sat night, but we had been drinking most of the day with our group) She did limply apologise (although not profusely), and said if we wished to make a complaint the general manager would call me on my mobile on Monday. Well here we are on Friday and I am still waiting for the call.... Not happy bunnies! All in all - no moans about the weekend itself, was very good, just think very bad planning and management and even worse customer service from the hotel staff have all been evident. I don't have any reason to stay there again, but wouldn't if I did, and certianly should not match up to AA's 3 stars!

Often stay at the Alton House Hotel whilst on business. Staff friendly and helpful. Rooms clean but some of the older rooms could do with refurbishment. Even though the food in the hotel is fine, being on the outskirts of the town centre a five minute gives you more than enough choice of restaurants/pubs.