What makes a good hotel/B&B?

We have stayed in a dozen hotels/B7Bs in Ireland and England over the last sixteen months, when covid regulations allowed. They varied from the excellent to the truly awful. The best small hotel - warm welcome, excellent food, thoughtfully designed bedrooms (eg a pressure pad activated a low light for a bathroom visit during the night, kedgeree on the breakfast menu, top-notch coffee and tea) - cost the same as one of the worst (coffee maker on the floor, ill-designed bedrooms, unfcomfortable beds, a mirror on the opposite side of the room from the hairdryer and its plug). 
So what makes a good hotel? A comfortable bed is essential, as are responsive staff/owners who communicate well among themselves as well as with the guests. Food doesn't need to be fancy, it just needs to be well-made with fresh, preferably local, ingredients. Fresh milk for tea/coffee in the rooms gets good marks from me, as do well-designed storage for clothes and suitcases, wooden coathangers,  mirrors well-placed for hair-drying, shaving, applying make-up. It's clear some proprietors have never tried to experience their rooms as guests, much less have lain on any of the beds. 
Over the years, I've been lucky to stay in some wonderful places - too many to list them all, but Casa Migliaca in Sicily, Hotel Yacanto in Argentina,  Clos St Vincent in Alsace, the Metropole in Hanoi and the American Colony in East Jerusalem, are in my top-ten. And I've never found a bad hotel or B&B in Germany. 
I've stayed in some out-of-the-ordinary places too - mostly in war zones. A hotel in Angola with water still lying in the bath from a previous visit, possibly months, or even years earlier, comes to mind. 
In July last year, we eased out of the first lockdown at Dromoland Castle, in the west of Ireland.  I wrote about it in an earlier blogpost. Golf almost always features in our travels, and Dromoland has a pleasant, and sometimes challenging (water hazards!) parkland course. Our next staycation, early September 2020 in South East Ireland, included golf at two of the prettiest golf courses in Ireland - Bunclody, at the foot of Mount Leinster, and Woodenbridge near the Meeting of the Waters in County Wicklow. We stayed at the Ferrycarrig Hotel in Wexford - a great place to stay during the Wexford Opera Festival (online only last year, but scheduled to have live audiences again this October.) At the end of September we played two rounds on a great West of Ireland links course - County Sligo (Rosses Point) and stayed at the Sligo Park Hotel. All the hotels coped magnificently with covid regulations. We never felt unsafe. 
Autumn saw a resurgence of the virus. Winter brought another lockdown. We spent Christmas at home, alone. Winter felt long, and lasted into the Spring. May, usually a lovely, blossom-filled month in Ireland, was wet. Happily, June, when we had scheduled a long-awaited visit to family and friends in England, brought summer weather and a holiday taking in Bristol, the Chilterns, the Lincolnshire wolds, the Yorkshire coast, the Lake District and the Solway coast - and some of the best and worst accomodation I've ever encountered. But the good - the Beetle and Wedge, Moulsford; the Petwood Hotel in Woodhall Spa; Ascot House, Harrogate; The Knoll, Newby Bridge in the Lake District - outnumbered the bad.  ( I won't name and shame them). And the English countryside in summer is truly glorious.