easyHotel Reading

Rooms are very small at the easyHotel, but they are big enough for a double bed, a television and a small en-suite bathroom (which is essentially a glassed-in shower cubicle in the middle of the room). However, there’s no room for a desk and there’s no wardrobe, just a couple of coat hangers stuck to the wall.

The rooms are too small for tea and coffee making facilities, but there is a coffee machine at the hotel reception.

It is very clean and has a bright modern decor, although not everyone is a fan of the bright easyJet orange colour scheme.

There are a handful of wheelchair-accessible rooms and these are slightly larger than the standard rooms.

The hotel is owned by easyJet and it is run on much the same lines as a budget airline. Rooms are priced according to the same yield management pricing strategy where rooms are cheap if you book well in advance but more expensive if you leave things to the last minute. Also like budget airlines, all those little extras that would normally be free at other hotels come at an additional charge. Do you want to watch the telly? That will be an extra £5 to rent the remote control. Need wireless internet access? That’s an extra £5 per day. Want a room with windows? That will be an extra £5. Need to park your car? That’s an extra £10. Want to drop your bags off early before check-in time? That will cost you extra too.

With easyHotel you’re basically paying for a clean place to stay for the night and you’re here to save money so it generally isn’t worth the extra expense for these add-on extras. Feedback from other guests suggests that the extra £5 for windows is a bit much, particularly since windows in some rooms are made of opaque frosted glass and even standard windows wouldn’t offer much of a view.

Despite the drawbacks, everything here is clean and new (it was opened in September 2018, although the building is much older) and can be a cheap place to spend the night (as long as you don’t pay for any of the extras).

It is one of the cheaper places to stay in Reading, but the cheap beds sell out quickly and once they have sold out the remaining beds are more expensive. If you book well in advance to get one of the cheap rooms then the easyHotel is probably the cheapest private room in town. However, it is not the bargain that you would normally expect from easyHotel particularly in a regional town that generally doesn’t see many tourists. In fact, most other hotels in the easyHotel chain are considerably cheaper than this one and even easyHotels in central London can work out half the price of this hotel.

easyHotel Reading is on Caversham Road, northwest of the town centre. The immediate area around the hotel has a few cheap places to eat (a fish and chip shop, a kebab place and a Nepalese restaurant) and there is a pub nearby and an Aldi supermarket a four-minute walk from the hotel. It is less than a 10-minute walk to the railway station and the town centre is around a 15-minute walk.

There are limited parking spaces available (just four or five spaces out the front of the hotel), which cost £10 per day.