For a DoubleTree I thought this property was lacking a little.

I booked a regular king room and was upgraded to a queen deluxe. This is perplexing to me as I have difficulty understanding how an upgrade can include a smaller bed than the one I booked. I queried the reception agent about this and she said they have two types of rooms - before listing, literally, five types. Apparently, the deluxe rooms are larger and even though I'd been given a smaller bed than I'd booked, I had been upgraded to a better room. Apparently. I asked if there were king deluxe rooms available and he said no. I then asked if it would be possible for me to book a king deluxe room on hilton.com right now and he said no, they were fully booked in that category. Five minutes later I jump online in my room and, yep, king deluxes are for sale (at exactly the same price as the queen deluxe).

To the agent's credit he called me a few minutes after I got to my room and enquired if everything was okay. It was indeed a very spacious room, particularly by London standards, with two large lounge chairs, a small desk and good sized TV. There was a welcome letter (although it greeted me as a Gold member rather than the accurate Diamond). the bathroom was reasonable in size with a smallish tub. The hot water did take quite some time to come through. A big plus was that the curtains (drapes) overlap on separate railing to provide 100% blackout.

Across the road from the hotel there were a number of shops and restaurants (it seemed) and in that sense the hotel is quite well situated. Despite that, I ordered a club sandwich from room service for GBP11 and it was delicious. Very tasty. I also ordered two bottles of water and declined to pay for them as they were not provided as part of the HHonors benefits. There was no issue with that. I ordered cold water and instead the bottles came room temp with a glass of four ice cubes. Handy.

The room had one of those trouser press contraptions attached to the wall that also had the world's tiniest ironing boards attached. And connected to the 'device' was the world's crappest iron. I called the careline and asked for a steam iron to brought up. It took 10 minutes but it came. But then I discovered there's nowhere to plug it into. The iron connected to the contraption is not able to be unplugged and because the only ironing board is the dinner plate-sized one attached, I couldn't iron elsewhere. So I couldn't iron.

I took the H56 bus from LHR T5 at a return cost of GBP9. The journey to the hotel took a long 35 minutes (as advertised) as it stops at one or two other terminals and a number of other hotels. On the return I took a similar bus from the front door to T3 in a journey time of less than 20 minutes.