Gwesty Links

Not on the Seafront — and That Is Rather the Point

Gwesty Links sits on Conway Road, out along the route that carries you from Llandudno towards Conwy and the mountains beyond. You will not open the curtains onto the bay. What you get instead is your car parked free outside the door, a quiet night’s sleep away from the promenade, and one of the best hotel dinners in the town. For anyone treating Llandudno as a base for exploring rather than a place to sit on the sand, that is a straightforward trade — and better than a thousand guests, who score it 9 out of 10, appear to agree.

Fifteen bedrooms

There are fifteen, and the modest number is a large part of the character; staff here know who is staying with them. Every room comes with its own bathroom, fitted with a bath or a shower, plus a flat-screen television, USB charging points, a hairdryer and the means to brew a cup of tea. Families are catered for. This is a small hotel, capably run, and the reviews make plain that the people working in it are the reason guests come back.

The bar and the restaurant

Here is where the Links parts company with the promenade hotels. Its restaurant carries an AA dinner award; its bar keeps award-winning cask ales; and the cooking is pub food done seriously rather than a hotel menu going through the motions. Special diet menus can be arranged in advance. Breakfast, too, is rated “fabulous” by the people who have eaten it. Come summer, a garden and a sun terrace wait for a glass to be carried out to them, and room service if the armchair has won.

The other Llandudno

There is a version of a Llandudno holiday that has very little to do with deckchairs. The town sits at the top of the Conwy valley, and within half an hour of Conway Road you can be up on Conwy’s medieval ramparts, climbing into the Carneddau, riding an inland surf lagoon, or standing in the woods above Betws-y-Coed. Basing yourself slightly inland, with the car at the door and a good kitchen to come back to, makes that version of the week considerably easier to organise.

Getting out and about

The address earns its keep the moment the engine starts. Bodnant Garden, the National Trust’s great hillside garden above the Conwy valley, is around twenty-five minutes away, and so is Adventure Parc Snowdonia, the inland surf lagoon at Dolgarrog. Reckon on about forty-five minutes to Eryri — Snowdonia — proper, and much the same to Zip World, with its zip lines and treetop courses. Conwy, its castle and its complete ring of medieval town walls are ten minutes down the road. The pier and promenade are a short drive, or a decent walk, back towards the water.

The cask ales

The bar is not an afterthought bolted onto a hotel, and the awards its cellar has collected are the giveaway. Cask beer kept properly is a matter of daily work — temperature, turnover, clean lines — and a hotel bar that bothers with it is generally a hotel that bothers with other things too. Add an AA award in the dining room and a reputation for pub cooking taken seriously, and the case for eating in rather than driving back to the front becomes fairly easy to make.

Making the call

Free parking, free WiFi, restaurant, bar, garden and sun terrace, with rooms opening at roughly £107 a night. If your idea of Llandudno is falling out of bed onto the beach, look instead at the seafront hotels on this page. If it is a proper dinner, a well-kept pint and the car waiting outside in the morning, this is the one to book.