Trimontium Princess Hotel

All Fur Coat And No Knickers!

This hotel certainly has all the trappings of a classy 4-star city centre establishment with its impressively imposing frontage overlooking the central square and its carpeted marble steps leading up to the gleaming gilt and glass revolving door. Once through the door the high-ceilinged lobby, with its elegant cornicing and crystal chandelier, continues the theme of opulence and grandeur.

My check-in is welcoming, friendly and efficient and the investment in a machine to read passports seems to do away with the Bulgarian norm of having my details hand-written (in triplicate) on the forms I've encountered elsewhere. Or perhaps thats the night porter's job - get all the info from the computer and fill in the forms properly?

Then it all becomes rather mediocre. My room is fine, but just that. It could be in any mid-market hostelry, anywhere in the world, blandly-furnished with the requisite 4-star boxes ticked. One box that hadn't been ticked though was the coffee making facility. That kinda buggered-up my personal 4-star routine of coat-off, coffee on, check for a Gideon's bible, light a cigarette, make coffee and then relax to read through the hotel gumph. Yep, no coffee (and no Gideon's BTW) - it's just not the same!

Otherwise the room is still fine - spotlessly clean, pleasantly warm (although the aircon is roaring away like a partly-constipated jet engine), the freebie WiFi is fast and seems reliable, and all the light bulbs work. There's a few scuff-marks on the walls and an engrained cigarette burn on the wash basin edge but these aren't major irritations.

The bed is comfortable , if unremarkably so and once I've switched the aircon off the room is pleasantly quiet with the double-glazing effectively blocking out any street noise.

Breakfast, in the vast ground floor dining room next to the lobby, attempts to recapture the opulence theme and is indeed impressively laid-out. There's mounds of fresh fruit (or should that be "Tepi"?), platters of all the normal Bulgarian zakusti, with a couple of Turkish touches such as the tooth-rottingly-sweet (but otherwise delicous) halva. There's three types of yoghurt with a lever-operated honey pourer to top your choice with (but the lever-pourer didn't actually work and so spoons were provided). The hot stuff, in gleamingly-lidded chauffeurs, has enough variety to satisfy a Texan Oilman and the sweet and salty pattiserie would do likewise for a Parisienne Grande Dame.

But (and you knew there was going to be a "But", didn't you?) the coffee was absolutely abysmal. I can forgive a multitude of sins committed by hotel breakfasts but naff coffee isn't one of them. This gunge, inelegantly-presented in cheap aluminium pouring flasks, tasted like it had been made last night with the leftover potwash water and not even reheated at that.

For a finale, having enjoyed my breakfast apart from the coffee, and with check-out not until midday, I decided to treat myself to a bath in the invitingly-spacious tub - the first I'd seen for almost a month. Well, I let the water run, and run, and run...and it never did get beyond baby's bath water temperature - that's another, this time, MAJOR gripe. I've never come across a 4-star hotel with insufficient hot water - maybe they'd used it all for washing-up last night and that might explain the coffee too!

Unique Quality: If I'd been paying 25-30 Euros a night I would class this hotel as very satisfactory. If I'd been paying anything close to the "rack rate" I would have been complaining to the manager. As it was I got a good rate and so it'll just have to bear with the classification of "satisfactory.

Good view from my window though!

(Oh, and it does have an attached Casino and a swimming pool and a fitness suite, none of which I used but they're there if you want them.)

• Opinion of Price: most expensive
• Related to: Casino and Gambling, Luxury Travel, Photography

Trimontium Princess Hotel Photo: Imposing Edifice

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Plovdivs famous hotel

The famous hotel in Plovdiv, everybody knows where it is, 176 Lev [£61] single a night. Luxury hotel lives up to its name. There are 158 rooms also casino and fitness centre. Enjoyed my stay.

• Opinion of Price: most expensive

Trimontium Princess Hotel Photo: Princess Hotel Plovdiv.

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What a wonderful and low priced hotel

My wife and I stayed for 7 nights in this hotel. I recommend it 100%. It is clean, good food, cheap, centrally situated, and very flexible. we were allowed to leave the rooms at no extra charge at 2300hours instead of the usual 1200hours limits, as we had a night flight.

I am not return again for I always look for new destinations, but be a stay in this hotel is a guarantee of full satisfaction.

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