Four Seasons Hotel

Breakfast Is in the Price — and the Dog Can Come

Two things separate the Four Seasons from the other Aberystwyth hotels on this page. Breakfast is included in the room rate rather than added to the bill in the morning, and dogs are welcome. Neither is glamorous. Both change the sum you actually pay and the holiday you can actually take.

The hotel stands on Portland Street, in the middle of town — two hundred metres from the seafront, five hundred from the pier, and a five-minute walk from the railway station. Rooms open at around £117, and just over sixteen hundred guests put it at 7.1 out of 10.

About that score

Seven point one is a fair middling figure and it deserves to be reported as such rather than dressed up. This is a solid, traditional, town-centre hotel rather than a boutique one; the bedrooms are bright and freshly decorated, the restaurant is a proper restaurant, and the value is genuine — but if you want the highest-rated room in Aberystwyth, this page has two other hotels that will serve you better and you should book one of them.

The rooms

Cosy, modern in decoration, each with a flat-screen television, a kettle and tray, and a bathroom of its own stocked with fresh towels and toiletries. Family rooms are available, and there is step-free access. A twenty-four-hour front desk means a late train is not a problem, and there is luggage storage for the awkward hours either side of a booking.

The restaurant and the courtyard

The dining room is a spacious one, serving light lunches, hearty cooked breakfasts and a varied menu in the evening, with a bar alongside doing drinks and snacks. Behind the building there is a courtyard terrace, and in good weather you can eat out on it. Room service runs, and breakfast will be brought up if you would rather not come down at all.

Practicalities that add up

Limited free parking, plus street parking and an electric-vehicle charging point. Currency exchange, a laundry and dry cleaning, an ironing service, a shared lounge, and a safety deposit box. It is an unglamorous list, and it is exactly the list a traditional town-centre hotel ought to be able to produce.

Where you are

Two hundred metres to the seafront, and the whole Victorian promenade from there — the pier, the castle ruins at one end, Constitution Hill and the Cliff Railway at the other. The station is five minutes on foot, which makes this one of the easier hotels in mid-Wales to reach without a car. Eryri lies within twenty-five minutes’ drive to the north.

Arriving by train

Aberystwyth station is five minutes’ walk away, and that matters more here than it would elsewhere. This is the end of the line — the Cambrian Line runs in from Shrewsbury and Machynlleth and simply stops, because there is nowhere further west to go. Coming by rail is genuinely one of the best ways to arrive: the last hour of the journey runs along the Dyfi estuary and through the hills, and you step off into a town you can then cross entirely on foot. A hotel five minutes from the platform, with breakfast already in the price, makes a car unnecessary for the whole stay.

To sum up

Breakfast in the price, dogs accepted, a central position, free parking of a sort, a restaurant, a bar and a courtyard, from around £117 a night. Not the best-rated hotel in the town, and this page will not pretend it is — but for a dog, a train and a breakfast you have already paid for, it is the one that fits.