Ivy Bush Royal Hotel

Eighty-One Rooms — Carmarthen’s Largest Hotel

Size changes what a hotel is able to do for you. A party of twelve can be put up under one roof instead of scattered across three addresses. A wedding can be housed. A conference need not be split across the town. With eighty-one bedrooms, the Ivy Bush Royal is far and away the biggest hotel in Carmarthen, and for a certain kind of booking that is not a detail — it is the whole reason to be reading this page.

Among those eighty-one are three family rooms, four executive rooms and a two-room suite, so the range runs as wide as the number suggests. The hotel stands on Spilman Street, carries three stars, and holds 7.3 out of ten across better than sixteen hundred reviews. Rooms begin at around £130.

About that score

Seven point three is respectable rather than remarkable, and it would be dishonest to dress it up as anything else. The building has been fully refurbished with the stated aim of keeping its older character while bringing the plumbing and the wiring into this century — an ambition every historic hotel announces and not all of them achieve. The reviews suggest the Ivy Bush lands somewhere solidly in the middle. What is beyond argument is the scale of the place, its position, and the breadth of what it can offer.

The rooms

Each has its own bathroom, most with a tub as well as a shower, and comes with a flat-screen television, a telephone, a desk and tea- and coffee-making equipment. Room service operates, and breakfast will be brought up to you — the kind of small indulgence a large hotel can absorb and a small one cannot. Downstairs, breakfast is rated “very good”. Dogs are welcome, which for a hotel of this size is more useful than it sounds; big parties often arrive with one.

Eating, drinking, and sitting outside

There is a restaurant and a bar, and — remarkably for a hotel of this scale in a town centre — a garden and a terrace with proper outdoor furniture. Particular dietary requirements will be catered for if flagged ahead of time. Step-free access is provided, and there is private parking.

The gateway to west Wales

The phrase belongs to the hotel, and it is a fair one. Carmarthen is the point at which the road west properly begins. Everything beyond it gets wilder and emptier: the Preseli hills, where the Stonehenge bluestones were quarried and dragged from; the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, which starts its long circuit not far past them; and the enormous beaches of Carmarthen Bay in between. Drive west from this door for an hour and the country changes character entirely.

For anyone touring the west, this is the obvious place to break the journey — and the Ivy Bush has been where people break it for a very long time indeed.

Weddings, conferences and large parties

This is what eighty-one rooms are really for. The Ivy Bush is the default choice in Carmarthen when a lot of people need to be in one building at the same time, and the hotel is set up for exactly that — function space, a restaurant that can seat a crowd, and enough bedrooms that guests are not scattered across four postcodes at midnight. If you are the one doing the organising, ring them directly and talk it through rather than booking room by room online; a hotel of this size will nearly always do better for you on the phone.

Worth knowing

Eighty-one rooms, a restaurant, a bar, a garden, a terrace, room service, private parking, step-free access and dogs accepted, from roughly £130 a night. Travelling as a group, bringing the dog, or simply want a hotel large enough to absorb whatever you throw at it? Size is the virtue here, and this is the hotel that has it.