Emergency plea to remote lodges
I have a confession to make. While I enjoy staying in comfy country houses and celeb-spotting in five-star hotels, I also stay in a lot of roadside lodges. If Travelodge, Travel Inn, Granada and the rest of the lodge operators were to run the name Gledhill through their computers, they would see I am one of their keenest supporters.
That fact eases my conscience as I break one of the rules that journalists who work on business magazines should always follow: criticise everything and everybody - except the people who buy your magazine. Yet before I make a valid criticism of roadside lodges, a bit of levity.
One of the commendable things about lodges is that they always have a room for disabled people. There aren't huge differences between the disabled room and the able-bodied room, but it is small considerations such as rounded corners on desks, grips on the side of baths, and signage in large letters which mean a lot to disabled people.
The reality of the disabled room is, however, that while they are used by those blessed with good health.
That is my excuse for the bother I caused in the lodge that put me in a disabled room for the first time, but offered no explanation of the functional differences.
It was a cold evening and I ran a hot bath to the brim. I sank into the water and still felt cold Thoughtfully, the lodge designer had provided a red cord at the side of the bath, obviously a means of turning up the heat in a chilly bathroom.
I pulled it and yes - laugh if you want to - no waft of warm air, but a piercing siren which caused the surface of the bath to ripple. The management quite rightly thought a disabled guest was in deep trouble in a deep bath.
Instead, there was a chilly able-bodied guest in the bath wondering why there wasn't a sign explaining what the red cord was for, why the door was being hammered on, and why somebody was shouting through the keyhole.
This real-life esapade highlights a serious omission from most lodges. In an emergency, how does a room guest summon help if there is not a phone, or in the case of the disabled room, a red cord?
It is the usual practise in lodges that they are manned by just one person, who usually doesn't stay all night. After a certain hour, the guests are left quite alone in their sleeping block.
The ramifications of this were explained to me last week by a bruly, middle-aged friend of mine - a man not easily intimidated.
He had been awakened from his sleep in a lodge during the early hours by a man banging on his door and shouting: "It's me, open the bloody door." Two things became obvious : the man was drunk and he had the wrong door.
My friend said he felt very nervous, all 16 stone of him. He heard the man go from door to door down the lodge corridor banging and roaring out the same demand to open up. Had my friend been staying in a hotel, he would have rung reception and asked them to get someone up on the corridor and sort out the problem. Being a roadside lodge, where he was cocooned with no outside link, there was nothing he could do but wait for the noise to subside, which eventually it did.
It is reasonable to suppose that the drunk was banging on the doors of single women staying at the lodge and if my 16-stone pal felt nervous, what would have been the reaction of the single women guests staying in the lodge that night? Terror-stricken is my guess.
Some lodge groups have bedroom phones - some don't. But every lodge bedroom in the UK should have some means of summoning help in an emergency.
If it is not a phone, then there should a panic button to triger outside help. At the end of the year, I'll name the lodges I stay that still fail to protect their guests adequately.
