According to the hotel group’s own website, their motto “is to provide you and your family with an extraordinary experience, such that you truly feel like you are at home with us”. This would perhaps be true if your home was down-at-heel, unloved, lacking in any modern comforts, and very, very tired. There’s a place for faded grandeur, but this hotel was just aged and shabby. Everywhere is expensive in Montreux, and especially so during the annual jazz festival. A shortage of mid-range chain hotels doesn’t help this, as the choice seems to be to pay a premium for luxury, or take your chances at a lower price. Although at around 300CHF per nights, the J5 Hotels Helvetie in Montreux could never be considered cheap. We paid well in advance to get the best rate we could, and after reading online reviews - which were mostly favourable. We must also must pay credit to the hotel’s photographer who seems to have managed to turn this rather run down and tired old hotel into something quite attractive. The hotel is, as others have noted, well located and around a 10 minute walk from the station or from the lake. But, the positives for us end here. Check in was a slow, painful process without any warm welcome. Actually, without any welcome at all to speak of. After handing over our ID, we were largely ignored as the receptionist continued to type away at her keyboard before finally we were presented with our key (which promptly fell apart. Perhaps a harbinger of things to come). The hotel’s public areas do have a kind of dated charm, and we passed through them to reach the lift to our fourth floor room. The rather dismal corridors were somewhat reminiscent of The Shining. The room was amongst the most basic I have stayed in in decades. I have come to expect no air conditioning (especially in older buildings in Switzerland) but the room was extremely hot, with one tired fan provided to help cool the room down. This presented its own challenges as with only three plug sockets in the entire bedroom (and one of these hidden behind the television), it became a choice of fan or tv; fan or bedside light. Again, with only a single plug socket each side of the bed, we had to make a choice between charging our phones or using the bedside lamp. Oh, and no headboards! Complimentary WiFi is provided but it’s slow (by modern standards) and unreliable. The tiny bathroom was well overdue a refurbishment, with a cracked shower tray, a dirty looking shower curtain and poor quality toiletries. Of course, it wasn’t necessary to use the shower at all, as the constant dripping of condensation from the pipes in the ceiling meant you could benefit from a “shower” of sorts simply by standing at the bathroom sink. Worthy of a mention too is that the bedroom did have a safe for valuables, but as this wasn’t fixed to the wall or the small, drab cupboard in which it was housed (and where 4 coat hangers were also provided) there was little point using it - the safe could j