London Hotels Insight provides up-to-date, independent advice for your perfect stay in London. We research guest feedback, meet management and identify hotels at the top of their game.
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Yotel
With another year having flown by, I thought I’d have a go at trying to work out which new trends will stick and which will sink without trace… There are some indisputably major trends – I suppose the boutique hotel has been one of the bigger trends, as well as the expansion into hotels by luxury brands such as Bulgari. [...]
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It’s no surprise that growth-hungry Travelodge was pleased to snap up the Mercure Hotel, with its convenient location close to London’s Gatwick airport. But it may come as more of a surprise to hear that the company has decided to totally transform the successful 4 star hotel. In a move to align the hotel with Travelodge’s [...]
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Attention all Japan lovers! This weekend (22-24 July) sees the second running of Hyper Japan at London’s Olympia Two exhibition centre, with a share of the proceeds going to the region affected by the recent Tohoku Pacific Earthquake. The exhibition is a fun extravaganza of all things Japanese, celebrating all aspects of Nippon culture including [...]
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We’ve featured YOTEL before – a revolutionary hotel group focused on airport hotels, packing maximum luxury into minimal space. Based on our YOTEL video and recent guest reviews, this approach seems to be working. One of the things YOTEL has done differently is to re-examine the check-in process – and automate it. So I spoke [...]
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Hotel jobs were traditionally almost always given to hotel professionals. The hospitality business has a well-worn training route, founded on vocational training and hotel school. This has been churning out well-qualified hoteliers for decades. And certainly when it comes to luxury hotels, this career path is still very much in place. In recent times, however, [...]
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Sometimes we only need a pillow to lay our heads – possibly on quite a limited budget. That’s where ‘no frills’ London hotels come in: an area of the market which has experienced significant innovation in recent times. What’s striking is how many new cheap hotel ideas have modelled themselves on airlines – and I’m [...]
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We’ve previously covered hotels near Stansted Airport and examined one of the best Heathrow airport hotels. Now it’s the turn of Gatwick – the UK’s second-busiest airport in terms of passenger traffic numbers. Although it lies some 28 miles south of central London, Gatwick is actually quite easy to reach from the centre of town [...]
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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 [...]
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To call the competition at the budget end of the London hotel market “vigorous” would be something of an understatement. You’ve got established budget chains like Travelodge and Premier Inn growing at breakneck speed, offering cheap promotions and decent locations aplenty – though often housed in fascinatingly “ugly” buildings. Then there are well-priced, good-quality independent [...]
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We’ve commented on the rise of London’s “luxury budget” hotels, with the likes of the Hoxton Hotel and Base2stay Kensington leading the way. There are also the impressive London airport hotels created by YOTEL, adapted from the Japanese “capsule” idea, which show that “cheap” can also be fun, look good and provide free WiFi. In [...]
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Several bloggers engaged on the “Free the WiFi” campaign have mentioned an odd thing: how can some of the cheapest hotels and hostels provide free internet access while many of the most famous brands cannot? Here we put the spotlight on London’s budget hotels to identify more “good guy hotels” with free WiFi. We hope [...]
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An announcement from Travelodge – already featured on this blog for their aggressively-priced “sales” – recently caught my eye. They’re now planning to spend a further £84 million to buy up and convert hotels in London. The company is even offering you a finder’s fee to help them find suitable sites and has set up [...]
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This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we publish videos of top-rated London hotels along with the latest TripAdvisor guest reviews. We’ve already published an in-depth feature on YOTEL and also mentioned the company in our recent overview of London’s “luxury budget” hotels. Below is the official video of the [...]
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A new type of “affordable luxury” hotel has well and truly arrived in London. When this term was coined to me a few years ago by the CEO of YOTEL, Mr Gerard Greene, I wasn’t sure I got it. After all, you generally get what you pay for, don’t you? But having now seen several [...]
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When I stayed in my first “capsule hotel” in Japan many moons ago, it seemed a uniquely Japanese experience which I didn’t expect elsewhere. I’ve been proven wrong by Mr Gerard Greene, the CEO of YOTEL, who has successfully made it happen in London. Mr Greene has added significant value to the “capsule hotel” concept, [...]
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As one hotelier once put it to me, the hotel business is simply “people serving people”. So the quality and training of staff, particularly at the luxury end, is absolutely critical. Different hotels have subtly different recruitment philosophies. Why should you care about this when you choose a hotel? Because attentive and friendly staff are [...]
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