‘Ghastly Muzak, powdery scrambled eggs and annoying toasters’: A new 221-room hotel has opened on Brighton seafront – but inspector is disappointed…

Catarina at the reception is trying her best, but she is all alone and busy on the phone explaining the price to a potential guest, while several real guests (including myself) are waiting to check in.

It’s not her fault, but you’d think a brand new hotel right on Brighton’s seafront would do everything it could to avoid such a standoff.

The Maldron opened last month. It has 221 rooms and is around the corner from The Grand Hotel, which has always been famous as the place where Margaret Thatcher survived an IRA bombing.

Catarina assigns me a room on the fifth floor. All is well until I inspect the bathroom, where dirty soapy water sits in the sink left by a previous guest.

It’s a clogged drain, so I go back to Catarina, who gives me another room on the second floor.

The inspector stayed at the Maldron, Brighton, a brand new hotel with 221 rooms, one of which is pictured here

It is functional, without much imagination. There are kitschy prints on the wall, which at least add a bit of colour. When I stand in the shower and squirt some soap into my hand, the whole dispenser falls off the wall.

On the plus side – and why there are a fair number of foreign tourists staying – it’s not a bad price at the moment, with a new 20 per cent opening discount in place. Overall, the Maldron has all the trappings of an airport hotel: big, tinny, over-lit, anti-theft hangers, awful Muzak, an officious voice in the lift, TV screens in the bar and dining areas.

The feeling of going somewhere is more of being there than of already being there.

The hotel is close to the famous Brighton Seafront (above). After a disappointing stay, the inspector says: ‘it’s a relief to walk on the beach’

But I enjoy my shrimp tacos and then play it safe with a halfway decent burger. The service is erratic. I ask twice for a glass of tap water, but it never comes, and at one point I get up to find a staff member in the hope of getting a second glass of wine.

At breakfast it’s the same again: a coffee machine on slow speed, scrambled eggs with powdered sugar, bacon swimming in grease and annoying toasters that never do their job.

After all this it is a relief to walk on the beach. You get what you pay for I guess.