hotelThe Hotel Inspector · Season 12, Episode 1 · Aired June 1, 2016
The Blue Inn
Redditch, England
The name changed after the show, but it kept operating. It now goes by Hotel Rafiya.
On the show
Season 12, Episode 1 · June 1, 2016 · inn
revisited in Checking In Checking Out (2017)
What happened after
Now trades as 'Hotel Rafiya' ('Under New Management'); official site live with active booking system.
What happened on the show
The Blue Inn in Redditch gave Alex Polizzi one of her stranger series 12 dynamics. She found herself turning referee between a hotel manager and an owner who monitored her every move on CCTV cameras from an office in Paris. That remote, surveillance-driven ownership sat at the heart of the case: a business run at a distance through cameras rather than presence, with the friction that inevitably created between an absentee proprietor and the person actually on the floor. Polizzi's task was to resolve that dysfunction as much as anything cosmetic, since a hotel cannot run well when the owner and the manager are effectively at war across a video link and a national border. The CCTV-and-Paris ownership dispute opened series 12 in June 2016 before the property's rename and change of management.
After the cameras left
The Blue Inn survives and has rebranded, now trading as Hotel Rafiya under new management, at Winyates Green in Redditch. Its official site is live with an active booking system and posted front-desk hours as of 2026, and Booking.com still carries a legacy blue-inn URL slug, confirming continuity of the same physical property under the new name. The dysfunctional CCTV-and-Paris arrangement Polizzi refereed appears to have given way to a straightforward rename and change of management, with the Redditch property continuing as a going concern.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.