Holiday Inn Newcastle - Gosforth Park

What is your Priority Club status?
Diamond

Were you (or for multi-stayers are you generally) happy with the hotel/stay?
Yes

Which room did you book and which upgrade did you receive?
2 Double Standard, upgraded to 2 King Premium (seems to be highest category)

How are the rooms?
Typical HI, condition kept to high standard, wide desk with many sockets.
Minibar had only free water and kit kat.
Air con worked well, bath was fine.
Windows could be opened but was situated directly in front of parked cars.

How is the exec. lounge?
None

What was good and what was bad?
Good
All staff were extremely professional and polite and seemed to take pride in their job, which is definitely not the case in many UK properties
Free parking with no registration needed. Small parking area for about 10 cars near entrance, which happened to have a free space when we arrived. Larger parking area was some distance behind the hotel.
Easy access from A1 road.

Neutral
Breakfast required the coupon (given out on check in, but 90% of UK HIs stayed this year have just gone with room number)
Food selection followed brand standard exactly and was just average.
Did not have time to use the pool but mentioned that no children allowed after 8pm

Bad
There was a problem with the door lock which would not open, which meant that it took 10 minutes to get into the room including going back to reception twice (fortunately was not too far away)
The night manager was not able to fix the issue (after we got in he spent about 20 minutes outside fiddling with the mechanism) so gave us one specially coded key that would force the lock to open.
No compensation was offered, but none was requested or desired.

Value for $ or Priority Club Points? Would you return?
OK deal for 17k points.