Grand Hotel Tiziano

SUMMARY
The hotel is obviously aimed at the business traveller or conference-attendee and provides all those reassuringly standard 4-star services and goods in a very bland, uninspiring environment. It has all the usual trimmings: conference rooms, bar, restaurant (it LOOKED good, but we did not visit), swimming pool and a gym. The rooms are smallish bud adequate, beds definitely comfortable but not huge, the staff attitude left rather lot to be desired.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Tiziano, but there is nothing that would make it special or worth visiting. The main advantage of Tiziano is its location (handy for the bus terminal); other features would be almost certainly found in other establishments of the same category. Lecce has several more 4 star hotels - I do not know how they compare to Tiziano in relation to prices, decor, service or general standards, but if I wanted to spend 75 pounds per room in Lecce again, I would certainly look somewhere else and would even consider paying a bit more for a better experience.

MY EXPERIENCE

I have to start with a caveat: we have not been typical or target-group visitor to Grand Hotel Tiziano. Our stay there had a hint of emergency visit and thus we did not sample all that the hotel had to offer. However, we used it as a hotel, in the way any one-night guest might do and thus I feel entitled to share my experience.
The reason we ended up staying in a four-star hotel during what was an essentially a camping/budget trip was... well, there is no avoiding that, my own stupidity. As a person responsible for the logistics of the trip I took the family to Brindisi airport a day early. We decided not to stay in Brindisi and go back to Lecce, which was - as we already knew from time spent there at the beginning of the holiday - a nice place. However, the hotel we used first time was booked up and eventually we ended up in a 70's style, low ceilinged, brightly lit lobby of Grand Hotel Tiziano, simply because the bus from the airport terminated more or less in front of that hotel. We went there to ask for information and possibly get a taxi phoned for, but being in a bit of a state by then we eventually took a double room there for one night and at the cost of 110 euros (about 75 pounds).
Grand Hotel Tiziano is situated just outside the Old Town area of Lecce. The hotel itself, a fairly non-descript rectangle of concrete, is your typical example of 70's standard, with spacious, low-ceilinged lobby dotted with comfortable leather chairs, interesting cream-shaded lamps and walls decorated with a selection of fairly bland prints.
We were greeted by an English-speaking and very cold receptionist whose only enthusiastic reaction was to our enquiry about possibility of ordering the taxi. Granted, as I said before, we were not your typical target group of the establishment, dressed in what was closed to dirty rags, with a massive rucksack filled with camping gear on the male back and a child-carrier filled with a snoring 3-year old on the female back; glint of insanity in our eyes. However, the welcome could have been slightly more, er... welcoming. At the end of the day we did take a room - the key to a double room was more or less thrown on the counter and no offer of a travel cot or any other sleeping arrangement for the wee one was made.
We made our way to the fifth floor and entered a room - again fairly typical, carpeted, air-conditioned (like the rest of the hotel), equipped with a double bed, small desk under which the fridge-mini bar was held, a soft imitation of an armchair (without arms) and a trouser-press/jacket hanger ensemble. It was small not to say cramped space, with hardly enough room on the floor to make a sleeping arrangement for DH using the camping gear we had.
The decor was again bland and plasticky, with the wood element taking the form of ash veneer, which always looks fake to me anyway. Two more of those boring prints again (one of them downright kitschy).
The bathroom was located on the right, opposite the wardrobe in the little entry-corridor, impressively tiled in black and aubergine, bright, immaculately clean and again quite small. It had all the standard basics - a shower cubicle, toilet, bidet, sink with an array of little hotel extras (this was the first time in my life when I actually used a shower cap - for my daughter as it seems impossible to shower her without a hand-held nozzle without getting her hair wet) including a hair-drier.
With DH unhappily tucked on the self-inflating camping mat on the floor, DD and I placed ourselves on the bed. It was certainly spacious enough for a 3 year old and me and it has to be said that it was nicely firm and very, very comfortable. My standards might have been bit lax as the previous 4 nights we spend in the tent but still, my back did not hurt in the morning and that is rare after a day of carrying heavy stuff.
As breakfast was included in the price of the room we decided to make as full use of it as possible and took the elevator down to the breakfast room in the basement (more bland prints). This was definitely the best part of the experience, with the buffet offered being really up to scratch in variety and quality. There was cereals, toast, soft and hard boiled eggs, selection of cheese, salami and ham (both cooked and raw), three kinds of jams, fresh and preserved fruit, croissants with jam and chocolate, rolls; blood orange and pineapple juice, coffee and even tea; and if you wanted more - some nifty cake/pastry things to top it all up. I have to say I have seen more impressive breakfast buffets (NB the best was unquestionably in Marriott Hotel in Warsaw) but the breakfast in Tiziano was not bad, in fact it was better than I expected as opposed to everything else that was either worse or just as expected.
After getting very, very full we went upstairs, packed, wend down to the reception which was manned by substantially more courteous and friendly staff than our midnight man of the night before (our clean clothes and faces could have had some effect) we paid up, left our stuff in the storage room and went off to have stroll round Lecce before setting off to the airport on the evening bus.