Tune Hotel Westminster shows early promise.

A double room at the new Tune Hotel Westminster: no-frills but certainly not bad!

We recently mentioned the much-hyped London launch of Malaysia-based budget hotel chain Tune Hotels which has enjoyed a fair bit of publicity.

Their first, slightly misleadingly-named “Westminster” hotel (it’s actually in Lambeth – the opposite side of the bridge!) is now up and running.

The verdict of most professional reviewers has been that the company is so far delivering its promise i.e. ultra-cheap base prices (which might cause even established budget hotel operator Travelodge to blush) while charging for extras you’d normally take for granted in a hotel.

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Imagine being charged for a hairdryer, tv remote and even daily room cleaning or towels and you’ll get the idea.  But on the whole the hotel is getting praised for the fact that it’s upfront about these extras.

It’s too early for Tune Westminster to be properly ranked on TripAdvisor since it will take time for a valid sample to be built.  But initial comments seem positive: for example, one reviewer stated “I was pleasantly surprised by this hotel” and another called it “A great place to sleep”.

I think these promising reviews are partly down to the fact that Tune Hotels has made no bones about the fact that it offers Ryanair-style, “no frills” accommodation.  And people’s expectations of Ryanair are so low, any service which it is compared to is bound to come across positively!

I also like the way that the Tune Hotels website is so transparent during the booking process, so you can see exactly what is and what isn’t included.  The screenshot below illustrates this quite clearly.

All the extras are clearly listed during the booking process, making for a highly-transparent transaction

So on the whole it seems most people are fairly happy with what they’ve seen so far.  We look forward at a later stage to giving it a head-to-head comparison against the new Travelodge Waterloo just down the road.  But for now it seems to have established a clear niche among London hotels.

At London Hotels Insight we particularly hanker after free WiFi – an amenity that Tune Hotels will of course charge for in line with its philosophy.  YOTEL currently stands alone among London’s leading budget hotels (i.e. those charging consistently less than £100 per night) in offering free WiFi.

But we’re pleasantly surprised that Tune do so at a fair rate of £3 per day: significantly undercutting rivals Travelodge and Premier Inn, both of which have so far patently failed to grasp the budget hotel free WiFi opportunity.

The only downside so far of the early promise shown by Tune Hotels in their first London hotel is the fact that – ironically – their prices seem to have crept up significantly above what they promise.  At the time of writing, testing by London Hotels Insight struggled to get a Tune room for under £60 a night – still good for London but not mindblowing value.

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Photo credits: Tune Hotel Westminster.

Tagged as: Premier Inn, Travelodge, Tune Hotel Westminster, Tune Hotels, Yotel