OYO the Rivenhall Hotel in Witham, Chelmsford

Upon arrival you could be forgiven for thinking this hotel was permanently closed. By the time you checkout you'll wish it had been. If rebranded as a Walking Dead, zombie apocalypse style theme park it would score highly, as a hotel not so much.

Arrived and reception was flooded by an Indian wedding group who obviously had not booked enough rooms. Some rooms were not ready for 3pm check-in, why? Room was ok but had a funny smell, we were told to let the hot water run for a while to get rid of brown water 😂. Took me 4 minutes or so to get shower working and no hot water at all. Loud and inconsiderate wedding group were noisy late at night and in the morning. Overall this Motel is over priced and poor quality, I would not recommend @ £162 per night room only!

I booked this hotel as ******* reviews were ok. I travel for work alot and regulary on my own. It was awful. Don't stay here. I arrived and there are two black gates as you enter. My car was the only one on the car park. It looked very baron. The grass was overgrown and it looked like no care had been taken to maintain the hotel. I entered the reception, it is really dark not light and airy like the photos. I was greeted by a gentleman who asked me if I wanted to check in. I advised I don't feel safe, I am and he replied yes. Would you like to see your room? At this point I wanted to run away. I went back to my car and found another hotel for the evening. ******* were very quick to respond and their custiner service was good.

We and another couple arrived at around 1:30pm on the day of our booking. Our friends had already tried to check in and were told to wait in the car park as the room wasn’t ready until 3pm. On the booking we had been asked what time we were expected to arrive and told them 1-2pm I walked into the foyer as I needed to use the toilet as we had been travelling for a while. There were no signs for the bathroom but walked through to where the bar used to be and went into the bathroom. There was no paper or any sign that it was in use. The bar area was completely closed off and looked derelict, our friends had already asked if there were drinks or food whilst they were waiting for their room and told nothing was available?? Another couple were checking in and looked just as horrified as we did but they were given a room number and were taken off to their room so I asked if ours was available yet as I needed to use the toilet still… We gave our names and were given our keys and the guy at reception walked us round to our rooms. At no point did he ask for payment to be made up front and I have sometimes paid as we have checked out of a hotel so I didn’t think anything of it. We unpacked our bags and drove to another location to have lunch before going to meet our friends. At 16:23 I received a phone call from the hotel asking if we’re still coming as we hadn’t been checked in, I explained that we had and told the guy what room numbers we had been allocated, he asked if we had paid and I said no one asked us? At 19:21 my phone rung again and it was the reception guy again still checking up on our booking?? We were out with friends and didn’t expect to keep getting calls from the hotel. We arrived back to the hotel just after midnight and went straight to our rooms. At 00:22 I received yet another phone call from reception asking about payment, we were understandably very tired after being out all day and evening and I certainly wasn’t going to walk back to the reception at that time of night. He proceeded to interrogate me about what time I was checking out so I said around 10am. For gods sake just leave me alone!!! We went to check out about 9:30am and there was a young lad on the reception that didn’t know how to take the payment, another guy was complaining about the lack of water in his room. We waited for someone to arrive supposedly a manager who was asleep. After about 10 minutes whilst we wee running through our list of complaints and no one had appeared, I said to the reception guy well it’s obvious you have my phone number so ring me and I’ll make payment over the phone. He then proceeded to accuse me of not wanting to pay! I had kept my cool until then but that was one step too far now he was just saying things that weren’t true. The manager finally appeared and when I said it’s just not acceptable to be called up 3 times during my stay and quite frankly be harassed as him and his staff are totally incompetent he was argu