We stayed here for two nights at the end of June 2024. We will not be returning. The writing was on the wall when we arrived and the only lift was out of order awaiting the service engineer. A member of reception staff reluctantly agreed to take our suitcases up to the fourth floor but only after I suggested it. Then the morning after our first night the toilet cistern stopped working so we had to move room. On our way out through reception to start the first of our museum visits of the day, we were asked to pack our suitcases so that staff could move us to another room once it had been cleaned. We felt we had no option but to comply with their request and rearranged our itinerary for that day. It felt like it was for their convenience not ours.

On check out, I asked about being forced to move rooms because of the non-functioning toilet. I received an apology - fair enough - but had to ask for a partial refund due to the inconvenience of moving rooms and having to rearrange our only full day in London. The cost of our two night stay was over £800 and I would not expect to have to change rooms in a so-called high-end “stylish boutique hotel”.

The receptionist said she was not authorised to offer such a refund. I asked to speak to the duty manager - this was around 11 am - and was told that manager was not in work until later and there was no other manager on the premises. This appears to be a not uncommon theme from reading other reviews on here. She said she would bring it to the attention of the manager later and email me that day. I never heard from her again. I phoned the hotel reception twice later that week and was told my request was with senior management but they could not tell me when I might hear back. I never did. Another repeating theme from other reviews too.

This is clearly a hotel management who care little about customer service and which is apparently reluctant to spend money on regular maintenance of the hotel infrastructure - another repeating theme? I took my complaint to IHG customer services but the hotel management did not even bother to reply to them so just this week IHG kindly compensated me.

Despite its great location, clean rooms with comfortable beds, the breakfast offering was only adequate and hotel service somewhat underwhelming if not unhelpful at times. I will stay elsewhere next time - this hotel is an embarrassment to the IHG brand.

***Handicap/physically challenged travelers beware***
We had a reservation at this hotel for August 1 with a prebooked handicap accessible room. We arrived at 130p to have an employee, Imran, check our name and then snappily tell us we couldn’t be checked in because it was too early and nothing could happen til 3p. We went and got lunch and came back at 245p hoping to get into the room to nap since we’d been traveling for 12hrs and was rudely told again we had to wait until 3p. Because somehow 15 min would make a magical difference? At 3p, they advised us they’d overbooked our accessible room and they had no where for us to stay. They promised to help us find another hotel but were unable to find another IHG property with an accessible room. The woman helping us, Lesse, promised to book us a room elsewhere but failed to mention it’d be at our expense and not at the hotel’s since they’d made the error. They also failed to bring in a manager to help. 2hrs later they still hadn’t booked us anything, so I finally walked over to a nearby hotel to ask to see a room to see if we could make one of their regular rooms work. When I came back and asked them to book it like they promised, we were told it’d be on our own credit card. Had we been told that at the beginning, at 130p when they didn’t have an accessible room, and at 3p when they promised us a hotel, we could have been booked at another hotel at 145p and chalked it up to an error and had been able to rest. But between Imran’s rude attitude and there being no manager available at 3 because they’d gone home for the day, they ended up wasting 4hrs of our day, a day where we’d been up for 16hrs traveling, for them to do nothing at all. When I asked Lesse for the name of the employee at check she said “I think it’s Imran?” Cut me the crap on not knowing your coworkers name, especially when you were giggling with him while “helping us”. I went back in the morning to talk to the hotel manager only to encounter Imran who said he was the service manager, to which I told him he was terrible at service and to find someone else. Another manager, Rax, came out and offered us points as compensation, but it was not enough to even cover a full night stay at another hotel. They made our first day in London an absolutely hellish experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone!