Even if you’re disdainful as to the validity of online hotel reviews, customer feedback that contains phrases including ‘absolutely dire’ and the words ‘drab’, ‘grimy’, ‘smelly’, and even ‘disgusting’, may give even hardened digital cynics pause for thought.
But these are the damning responses of guests unwise or unlucky enough to have stayed in one of the Britannia chain of hotels.
It’s a group that owns many grande dames of the British accommodation scene such as The Grand in Scarborough, the Metropole in Blackpool and The Adelphi in Liverpool, and is running them into the ground.
You’d think vacancies at these hotels wouldn’t be hard to find. But at least 17 of the 64 hotels in the Britannia group are now block-booked.
The new ‘guests’ are asylum seekers, who the government are paying the chain to house.
Britannia regularly tops consumer review polls to claim the dubious crown of worst hotel chain in the UK.
Yet the dirt, the grime and the Basil Fawlty-style service in their hotels is of little concern to the chain’s chief executive Alex Langsam, who, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, has accumulated wealth to the tune of over 400 million pounds.
His company is believed to be making profits of over £100,000 a day, in part thanks to Langsam’s new reputation as the ‘asylum king’.
Living in a 10-bedroom mansion in Cheshire valued at over 3 million pounds, Langsam has, for over a decade now, signed numerous government contracts which enable his hotels to be used to house asylum seekers.
The Britannia International Hotel in London’s Canary Wharf district is next on the list to house small boat arrivals; attracting both protestors to the site as well as contractors who have constructed a ring of steel around the building- where, normally, costs per room start at over £100 per night.
Langsam himself is intensely media shy and fiercely guards his privacy as the high walls and hedges surrounding his Altrincham home attest. Many veterans of the UK hotel scene claim they have never met the octogenarian who is believed to be unmarried and has no known children.
One insider claimed that Britannia have a reputation for seldom corresponding with journalists, politicians or property developers.
Langsam’s family are Austrian; fleeing to Britain three months before Alex was born when the Nazis annexed their home country. Interned on the Isle of Man before moving to the Sussex coast, it perhaps makes sense that Langsam, a migrant to the UK himself, may now want to extend a helping hand to those now arriving on British shores.
Yet there are clearly financial gains to be made from the slew of government contracts to house migrants that Langsam has accepted- to the point where an estimated one in ten asylum seekers in the UK are housed in one of his hotels.
Starting up Britannia Hotels in 1976, through the purchase of the 100-bedroom Country House Hotel in Manchester, Langsam went on to acquire dozens more hotels before buying the Pontins group of holiday camps in 2011 for an estimated two million pounds.
He has claimed to always make ‘the necessary investment to restore them [hotels] to their former glory’.
Customers and critics alike have consistently disagreed, with those unfortunate enough to pay for a stay at numerous Britannia hotels reporting tales of damp, sewage and mould in bedrooms and bathrooms that, in the words of one reviewer, have been ‘left to rot.’
Dr James Davies, MP for the Vale of Clwyd where the mothballed Pontins Prestatyn site (closed suddenly in 2023 and yet to reopen) has accused Britannia of failing to maintain their estates, while ‘raking in’ money from ‘asylum accommodation’.
‘They were relying on government funds to bankroll their business model,’ he alleges.
In the one interview that Langsam has granted the UK press (to the Guardian in 2011), he explained that his ‘formula’ was to buy and restore ‘extraordinary buildings’ to be ‘enjoyed by ordinary people’.
For his 2,000-plus employees who have never met this enigmatic figure, the new reality is that these ‘ordinary’ people’ are now more likely to be illegal migrants than holiday guests.
As the online reviews go from bad to worse, the profits, for the Asylum King, are rising ever higher.
