Premier Inn Birmingham

The hotel is very handy for seeing city centre sights, as close to New Street station, all shops, and sight seeing venues in town. The hotel is only about 15 years old, and in quite good state, it’s on a busy business street right in the heart of town, tucked in between other blocks of offices. (Photo 1). Disabled bays are just along the road, but hard to get a spot, as workers of the city park on the bays, and disabled can do so without time limits. Entry into hotel is on the level through sliding doors (photo 2) and you enter reception through another push pull fire door, into a small but clean enough reception area (photo 3) just to one side is the restaurant and sitting lounge with a push door (photo 4) and you enter the restaurant area (photo 5) with a pleasant well stocked bar (photo 6) and you will find areas to place your wheelchair (photo 7). It’s here that you will enjoy buffet breakfast, lunch and evening dining (photo 8) Just beyond reception you will find a lift (photo 9) quite a good size so you will all get in together. The Bedrooms are quite good, disabled of a good size for you, but todays visit could not allow us upstairs to see rooms, but having stayed here ourselves, we can recommend the hotel, it’s nothing flashy, just good basic comfortable accommodation, with a reasonable and good menu on offer. Opposite reception, which also has self booking machines (photo 10) you will find disabled toilet (photo 11) with a small basic but clean and well looked after room, with grab rails and pull cord (photo 12) then it’s back into the restaurant if you want to relax before moving on (photo 13) OUR FINAL THOUGHTS If you are in town shopping, it’s a good hotel to pop into for coffee or eating, we certainly felt bar area and seating was comfortable, and if you wanted to stay overnight it’s a good base, shops are just around the corner. We feel you would be comfortable here. We would recommend it, it’s not fancy but quite a nice hotel.

Room 216 has a wet room and, like almost all accessible rooms at Premier Inn it is a good size with plenty of room for a wheelchair user to move about freely. Width of main door: 86.5cm. Currently, check-in is after 16:00 but we popped in at 14:30 and our room was ready. The king size bed was made up of two single zip and lock beds and, at a height of 47cm it was easy enough for my wife to transfer from her wheelchair. The mattress was comfortable enough, and two firm pillows and two softer pillows were available to us. This is an old style room and was showing signs of a little wear and tear. It also has the smaller TV and there is no HDMI as the newer rooms have; of no great consequence to us as we only used it for a short time. It was pleasing that the room still had the old style wardrobe unit, which we prefer to the ones in the updated rooms; it offers more storage capacity. The room also lacked the vanity mirror of the newer rooms, which is always set too high for a wheelchair user. There were enough electrical sockets around the room, including one on the left side of the bed. The basic Wi-Fi offered a good signal, with no dropouts. Mobile data (O²) was strong too. As is common with most of the hotels in this chain, the accessible bathroom was a good size, with a sliding door that opened to a width of 81cm. The thermostatic shower was easy to control and the water pressure was very good; it remained at a constant temperature whilst showering. The shower area, like so many in hotel wet rooms, was missing a small shelf on which to place shampoo, body wash and so on. It can be very difficult for a disabled person, when seated, to reach necessary items when the floor is the only place to put them. The room had three good sized windows, which looked out onto Waterloo Street and the nearby cathedral grounds, and let a lot of light into the room. The outer double glazed windows could be opened to a degree, which afforded us with fresh air. With those windows closed along with the secondary sliding windows, most but not all outside noise was eliminated. The blackout curtains were not very effective in that they were not hung properly; this meant that there was some light coming into the room at night from the streetlamps outside. The A/C was very efficient at cooling the room to 19ºC, but it was showing its age and was quite noisy. I would have ordinarily opened the windows but the noise from outside prevented me from doing so. Solution: ear buds. Our room was two floors above the bar and restaurant next door and as such, we could hear the constant base of the music from there into the night. It didn’t bother my wife, who can sleep through a hurricane, but I needed ear buds. We have stayed previously at this hotel, also looking onto Waterloo Street, but that time we were on the top floor and away from the aforementioned bar and restaurant; that time we didn’t suffer any noise disturbance. That is something to think about if we stay here in the future. The hotel only has a Bar & Block restaurant, which we did not use.