The Tower House is an undeniably quaint 17th century townhouse located smack dab in the middle of Oxford. Unless you want to pay four times the price to stay at one of the handful of higher-end chain hotels that are equally centrally-located, the location simply cannot be beat. Sure, it would benefit enormously from some fairly superficial and probably long-overdue updates, like new carpeting. But all the essential elements for a safe, convenient and reasonably-priced stay in central Oxford are there. The only thing I really wished they had done better was pre-arrival communication. Unlike a lot of other small properties that aren't staffed 24 hours a day, I received virtually no information from the Tower House prior to arrival. There is sign taped on a window providing a WhatsApp number to call if you need to contact someone, and once I figured out how to do that they were helpful enough, providing instructions for how I could store my luggage until check-in time. It would have been much easier, however, if I had received some sort of detailed message the day before my arrival making all those details clear. At least in my experience, it's that sort of careful forethought on the part of a proprietor about what it feels like to show up after fifteen hours of international travel to a locked door with no one about to welcome you that separates the okay but clearly informally run family operation from the character-filled boutique property..