Clapham Travelodge, next to Clapham Junction tube

I recently claimed that I was never grumpy, which someone challenged, telling me that my attitude towards those who mistook Battersea for Clapham was textbook grumpiness. I corrected them. My attitude towards those who make such simple geographical mistakes is best described as righteous anger.

Or maybe righteous wrath.

It is currently aimed towards Travelodge, who are currently completing a new hotel on Falcon Road. Being a building site they have caused problems for their neighbours on Mossbury Road to be sure, but through it all I remained fairly emotionally balanced. But when their new hotel was listed on their website it immediately provoked a fit of righteous wrath.

To be fair, they did make attempts to compensate, cutting through decades of TfL delays and engineering to put Clapham Junction on the London Underground network (with an entrance I assume is in the menswear at Arding and Hobbs Debenhams). Despite that, I decided the only proportionate response was an email to the chain.

Contacting them is quite hard, their webform forces you to answer lots of questions, and only a few allow you to answer them. The Clapham Junction Town Centre Manager was one who managed to get through to them. She was told:

We appreciate that the location of the hotel is in between Clapham and Battersea, however we already have a hotel called ‘Battersea Travelodge’

Apart from being wrong about being ‘between Clapham and Battersea’ (because they are in Battersea), I can see the logic. And it does leave open all sorts of alternative names; I was wondering about Manhattan Travelodge, it is, after all, located between Manhattan and Southend-on-Sea, but they already have a Southend Travelodge.

I was blessed with a slightly more positive response:

your feedback has been forwarded to our facilities for them to make the decision if this hotel should be renamed before its opening

Sadly, I think this translates to ‘we’ll pass this on to someone else to ignore’.

On the upside, the responses at least mean we have an email address for Travelodge which obviates the need for their awful customer service webform, it’s customer.services@Travelodge.co.uk.

In fact, I’ve gone even further. If you think they need to re-think, then here’s a pre-filled email with a few facts that might help convince them to reconsider their name.

3 thoughts on “Travelodge get it wrong over Battersea

  1. […] One of the major victory in December 2011 was with Google map correcting  its data and putting Clapham at the location where it is, and not in the middle of Battersea on top of our town centre Clapham Junction. Since then the campaign managed to register many other success such as Asda renaming it shop “ASDA Clapham Junction, Battersea” (despite evidence, Asda decided first to hold a ballot to decide if they were in Clapham or Battersea!) or Travelodge Hotel beside Clapham Junction station first advertising their location as Clapham. […]

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