Text 1: Review: The Quayside Pod Hotel, by Leanne Marsh

An original contemporary online review.

If you need a bed for one night near the station and don’t plan to spend any time in it awake, the Quayside is hard to beat at fifty-nine pounds. Just don’t expect to swing a cat.

There is no reception desk. You check in at a touchscreen kiosk in the lobby, which prints a key card and wishes you a pleasant stay in a slightly unsettling voice. My room was on the fourth floor, reached by a lift that smelled of new carpet. It measured roughly eleven square metres and had no window, though a panel above the bed glows a soft blue to imitate daylight.

Everything is controlled from an app: lights, temperature, even the blackout of the glass shower door. It worked, mostly, although at one point I turned the bathroom fan on instead of the reading light and couldn’t work out how to stop it.

The bed, to be fair, was excellent, and the room was spotless and silent. Breakfast is a grab-and-go counter of pastries, fruit and coffee from a machine, at seven pounds extra. You won’t meet a single member of staff unless something goes wrong. For some guests that will be a selling point.

Text 2: A letter from the Grand Midland Hotel, by Thomas Bewley

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1879, a commercial traveller describes to his wife a night at a large new hotel built beside a railway station.

My dear Ellen, I write from what is surely the most splendid inn in the kingdom, and certainly the dearest. It stands against the station, so that a porter took my bag from the train and I was in the hall before the engine had stopped steaming.

Imagine a hall as high as a church, with a marble staircase and a clerk in a frock coat who wrote my name in a great book. I did not climb the stairs, for there is an ascending room, worked by water, which carries six persons at a time to the upper floors. My room had a carpet as thick as turf, a fire already lit, and a bell by the bed which, when pressed, summons a servant by electricity. I pressed it twice, purely from curiosity, and was ashamed when the poor fellow came running.

Dinner was served at half past six at one long table for eighty persons, with soup, fish, two meats and an ice, and a waiter behind every third chair.

My bill this morning came to eleven shillings, with a charge for candles and another for attendance besides. The firm shall hear of it. Your affectionate husband, Thomas.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what the hotels offered their guests.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.