Park Lane Hotel

This hotel, in the Picadilly area. Is fine. However the room decor is quite tired, and the public areas - other than the main lounge - are even more tired. There are much better maintained and situated hotels.

Appalling.

First of all I would like to emphasise that I do not usually complain when staying at a 5 star hotel as in the past, I have always had a great experience bar minor issues which I let go.

I would not rate The Park Lane hotel any more than a 3 star and that is being generous.

Our room was extremely disappointing (104) it was so tiny it would remind you of a bedsit. The bed was barely big enough to be called a double and the headboard was only for a single bed. The bed was also pushed against the wall making it difficult to get in and out of especially during the night when one needed to get to the toilet.

The bathroom was completely unsatisfactory, the tiles were cracked and the sink had a brown dirty rim. The bath was also cracked and the shower itself was hideous. When we turned it on the whole bathroom got soaked and all our towels which were hanging beside it. This was due to the shower head being totally unstable.

There were no tea and coffee facilties or complimentary water which you would come to expect in a hotel of this class. We had to phone down for water and were told it would take 15 mins, 40 mins later we got the water.

I got the feeling that this room hadn't been used in a while as I found a book beside the bed which was book marked, a previous breakfast order for room service dated the 15/10/08 and we were expected to use this. The television did not work either and we had to call for an engineer to come up and fix it.

I decided to head down to the hotel's restaurant with my husband to have dinner and was told that they were fully booked, then the waitress advised me that if we didnt mind to sit in the lounge area she would serve us the food there. She gave us menu's and told us she would be in to take our order. We waited for 45 mins and no one came so therefore I had to go back to the restaurant with our orders. It took another hour for our meal and we only ordered two pizzas.

The staff never asked either of us if we were guests of the hotel nor for our room number or to sign for any bill. We waited for a while in the lounge as we were having a few glasses of wine. No one came near us with a bill so myself and my husband got up and went back to our room completely dissatisfied with the service.

There was a ball on that evening in the hotel and it was just unfortunate that our room was located directly above this and the music was so loud it went on until 2.30 am.

I complained to the duty manager the first night and he promised to have us moved to a new room the very next day which he did. The room however was described as a executive room but as far as im concerned it was a standard king room which I was expecting upon check in.

Upon checking out we also were given the wrong bill twice, it had expences on it which we didnt even know about eg a movie purchased which we didnt watch and breakfast expenses which we didnt eat.

We are from Belfast and we had travelled to London for the weekend for a medical reason and we thought staying at this hotel would help take our minds off this but The Park Lane hotel let us down very badly. We will never be staying at the hotel ever again and would advise other travellers to stay elsewhere. Horrendous experience. Fawlty Towers springs to mind.

I was in town on business for just one night and didn't arrive to the hotel until after midnight after my work event. I was promptly checked in and immediately ordered room service when I got to my room as i'd missed dinner. I'm always surprised how long it takes, even when you order at a time when the kitchen shouldn't be busy. Luckily it wasn't too long -- I would say about 30 minutes, but still, for a chicken sandwich, I would think they could get it up to me in 15 min at that hour.

The room itself was fine, the bedding was nice and the room wasn't large, but definitely not too small, especially since I was travelling by myself. I've stayed at the Le Meridien Picadilly which has not mastered the art of maintaining the "London feel" or Victorian style of the rooms without making it look old and dated, but this Sheraton did a much better job. The shower was an older style, but actually worked fine for my needs.

The only other problem was they couldnt figure out how to add my husband's SPG number to the reservation, finally I got it from my husband the next day and called them and they were able to add it.

Overall, I was pretty happy with my stay. The location is good and the room was nice. My dinner was good enough, but I did have quite a few drinks that night so anything probably would've tasted good. Best of all though, is I booked this hotel for L129 on last minute as part of their "Top Secret" hotel that they dont' show you until after you've made your booking. I was definitely happy about that and when I checked on their website, the same room was going for L219... definitely a deal!