We arrived in the Airways Hotel early on a Tuesday afternoon, to be greeted by the receptionist shooing us into a sofa so he could continue his telephone conversation with Western Union. Apparently he was having a great deal of trouble transferring money to his parents back in India and was deeply unhappy about the poor customer service he had received. We did not appreciate the irony at this point, but certainly do in retrospect.

About fifteen minutes later, he deigned to finish his call and pay attention to the paying customers wilting in front of him. It was around 11.45am by this point, but we were not able to check in until 1.30pm. Despite the fact checking out time was half ten in the morning, the fastidious cleaning team was clearly still beavering away, ensuring every room was sparkling clean.

We went for a bit of a walk (the local Sainsbury's is a tourist attraction to rival the Royal Wedding) and got back to the hotel about fifteen minutes early, I'm not sure if this timing error is connected to the fact we were then quickly dispatched to the Hanover Hotel over the road - in fact we never received any sort of explanation for why we had to go to this hotel - but over the road we went.

The Hanover Hotel is truly a sight to behold. Or a sight to avoid, A sight, either way. The receptionist shuffled a stack of room keys in front of us, giving us a seemingly random choice, but a choice we later realised was the worst room in the hotel. Any hotel really, We suspect they try to palm this room off on most guests to see if they can find someone meek enough to put up with it, as they quickly moved us when we complained. A dank room on the fourth floor, only accessible by climbing a staircase suitable for penitent pilgrims, the filthy window was almost entirely blocked by a slab of concrete and the three or four beds had been crammed in to allow little room for movement. Following another trek down the stairs, taking in exposed wiring and building materials along the way, we were presented with our next option, on the second floor.

This room, while not quite as bad as the penthouse purgatory we had previously been presented with, had its own problems. It contained a double bed and a single bed. The single bed had been propped up on one corner with a magazine, perhaps to account for the bizarrely sloping floor. The double bed had a ripped sheet with a suspicious brown stain. The floor under this double bed had clearly never been vacuumed, displaying travel cards and sweet wrappers from some previous victim. The windows were coated in thick grime and the curtains were not much better. My personal favourite was the plastic glasses displayed next to the kettle. They can't have been intended for human use, so were perhaps the result of some desperate attempt to manufacture antibiotics in order to ward off whatever exotic infection had afflicted the last "guests". The surface they were placed on was thick with dust and the cups placed next to them were thick with... well, something brown.

Following another complaint (the phone in the room didn't work, so the complaint involved another trip down the stairs and through the building site) we received two visitors. The first brought our plastic glasses and cups back, having swilled them out with something I assume was at least liquid, if not actually water. The second came brandishing a sheet, looked at the brown stain and said "Oh, it's only a little mark..." It was about four inches long, which is a little over my limit for brown stains. We actually had to persuade her to change the sheet by pointing out the numerous rips. Perhaps someone had previously considered ripping it up and forming it into a rope in order to escape through the window, only to have thought better of it upon being presented with the sludge adorning the glass. She eventually changed the sheet, tucked half of it in and departed in a huff.

We spent the next half an hour or so searching the internet to find another, more hygienic hotel that we could afford to move to. Luckily I had a 3G phone as nobody had bothered to give us the WiFi password. Everywhere under £150 was full, so we decided to cut our trip short and get a bus back to Manchester. When we got to the reception to ask for a refund, it was just before 3pm. We had checked into this hotel at about 1.20pm. The receptionist's first response upon hearing we wanted our money back was not to ask what was wrong, not to apologise, but to say, "You've been in the room for three hours, you can't have a refund", and then, "If you want a refund you need to contact your travel agent". After much arguing, he miraculously managed to find us a room back over the road in the hotel we had originally booked, the Airways.

Reception in the Airways was full of many unhappy looking travellers. I can only begin to imagine the indignities they were in store for. The receptionist appeared a little stressed - maybe something to do with Western Union - and quickly gave us a key to our third room. Amazingly, it was reasonable. The floor appeared to have been cleaned relatively recently, the bedsheets were apparently clean and someone had replaced the plastic glasses with mugs, giving us four mugs between two people. The manky blue blanket was still present, but this was swiftly dispatched to the wardrobe. We even had a balcony, of sorts. We suspect they keep this room back to placate angry customers, of which there must be many. Admittedly, one of the windows was cracked and - hilariously - had an elastoplast stuck over the crack to prevent it spreading, but as cheap hotel rooms go it wasn't appalling. A minute or so later, we received a narky phone call from the receptionist, asking how the room was and saying that we would not be allowed to change again if we accepted it. I did feel terribly guilty about the horrible inconvenience we were causing them for not wishing to sleep in filth, but I tried to not let it colour my experience.

The night's sleep would have been better if we trusted the blue blanket thing. They clearly don't believe in wasting money on luxuries like heating, so the pair of us shivered under a single sheet. Also, in the hour we spent in the Hanover Hotel, we managed to be bitten repeatedly by something unpleasant, resulting in a great deal of itching. Breakfast was your usual weak coffee, stale croissants and bland cereal, but livened up by reading the faces of the other guests and wondering who would be the first to snap and start breaking furniture. Sadly, as far as we know, nobody did - at least not that morning. My girlfriend skipped breakfast, which was good as otherwise she would not have had the unique experience of a mirror nearly falling on her head as she removed a plug from the wall. We initially thought half ten would be a bit early to check out, but somehow managed to motivate ourselves to be through the doors by nine.

We booked this hotel through a cheap hotels website, which offered a "mystery three star hotel" at a discount price. The mystery is how they got the three stars in the first place. I doubt this claim is anywhere close to being true.