Headlands Hotel

The Llandudno Hotel That Takes the Dog

For a great many people this page can stop here: of the hotels we list in Llandudno, the Headlands is the one that welcomes dogs. If you are travelling with a spaniel in the back of the car, no amount of chandeliers elsewhere is going to compete with that, and you may as well know it straight away.

It stands on Hill Terrace, which climbs away from the promenade on the Great Orme side of the resort. The height is the point. From the garden and the terrace you look out over the water in one direction and the mountains in the other, and the noise of the seafront on a warm evening stays comfortably below you. The pier is a hundred metres down the hill.

The rooms

Each bedroom has its own shower room, along with a television, a wardrobe, free toiletries and everything needed to make a cup of tea. Family rooms can be had. A wake-up service and ironing facilities exist for those who want them; the building is carpeted and warm throughout, which matters more in a North Wales February than any designer’s mood board. Private check-in and check-out is offered, so an arrival can be dealt with quietly rather than in a queue.

Mornings and parking

A full English is cooked to order every morning, and guests think well of it — the hotel holds 8.4 out of 10 across better than seventeen hundred reviews. The car park is free and belongs to the hotel, and given the gradient of Hill Terrace that is not a small kindness. Free WiFi runs throughout.

Bringing a dog to Llandudno

It is a good town for it. The Great Orme, immediately above the hotel, is open sheep-grazed headland criss-crossed with paths, and the Marine Drive loop gives a level five-mile circuit with the sea below you the whole way. Llandudno’s North Shore beach operates seasonal restrictions on dogs, as most resort beaches do, but the West Shore — around the other side of the Orme, facing the Conwy estuary — is the traditional answer and is a good deal quieter into the bargain. Several pubs in the town take dogs in the bar.

The Great Orme starts here

You are standing at the foot of it, and the walking begins the moment you leave the door. Marine Drive, the old toll road, loops right around the headland above the sea. The summit can be reached on foot, aboard the cable-hauled tramway, or by the longest cable car in Britain, and there is a country park and visitor centre when you get there, plus the Bronze Age copper mines on the way up. Below the hotel, the pier and the promenade are two minutes away, Venue Cymru is roughly a mile east along the seafront, and the Leisure Parks are a couple of minutes off. Liverpool John Lennon, 68 miles away, is the nearest airport.

Hill Terrace

The address is a small piece of Llandudno history in itself. Hill Terrace was cut into the lower slope of the Great Orme when the resort was laid out, giving its houses a view over the rooftops that the grand seafront hotels below them, for all their frontage, do not have. The climb from the promenade is short but it is a climb, and it is what buys the quiet and the outlook. Anyone who would rather not walk up it at the end of an evening should know that the car park is at the top, not the bottom.

One last thing

Dogs welcome, parking free, WiFi free, garden and terrace with views of both sea and mountains, and rooms opening at around £100 a night. Pet terms can differ from room to room, so confirm the arrangements when you reserve — but if a dog is coming to Llandudno with you, start your search at this one.