Hotel: The Standard London
Room Booked: Queen of Queens
Rate: $339/night (3 nights totalling $1,222.15 after taxes and fees)
Early Check-in: N/A
Late Checkout: 12 pm
Upgrade: Upgraded to a King of Kings room with a tub. Had a snafu in that they put me into a standard room (standard bed, no seating or minibar, rather small), that they were convinced was an upgraded room and that I was mistaken. I would have begrudgingly believed them if I had not seen the room my MIL who booked separate had gotten - the same corner room I should have been upgraded into (she was a standard queen booking). I think they just mixed up our rooms, but it was annoying how they were convinced I was wrong until I pushed. The good news is instead of swapping the rooms for us the guy at the counter just put me into the King of Kings tub room right next to the MIL, so we both ended up with upgraded rooms.
Room Credit: 75 GBP. Many good restaurant and bar options, all of them overpriced even by london standards however. Ended up using it on the pub which was average. Expect to pay $20 for a bad burger with no fries. This credit would be much better spent on the drinks, which were still overpriced but at least good and in line with "hotel cocktail". That said, the flagship restaurant Decimo looked genuinely good and more worth the high asking price, we were just not looking to spend that much on dinner for this leg of the trip.
Breakfast: Full breakfast buffet free every day we were there, which was a surprise. Saved a ton of money having this available to us. They had a full english buffet + continental breakfast buffet that was all you can eat, including ordering custom espresso drinks. The food was great to average. I'm just surprised at how much was on offer for no cost.
Comment: Incredible style and hotel, great location, not a terrible price for what you get. While the room mix up was annoying, the upgrade was a huge jump in quality of life for us especially as we were working from abroad for some of this trip and having the bench seating + table in the room made it very comfortable. The mini bar was super well stocked but you'd be a fool to actually take advantage of it even if you were in the mood to splurge (I think I saw $80 for a 350ml of bombay sapphire gin? and $8 for a small snack pack of pringles?). I disliked not having doors to the "wet area" *(there was no actual bathroom, just a shower zone and a WC...I like feeling enclosed). You'd be hard pressed to find a room this size in london for the price we paid. The variety of bars/restaurants in the hotel were great, all incredibly well appointed. You can tell this place had a top tier designer design it and they actually let them go to town on the execution. Considering half the reason we like to travel is to pretend we are Poirot visiting beautiful places, this hotel did it in spades. My only real criticism of the hotel was the service at the pub and buffet were genuinely terrible. Coffee carafe never getting refilled (and it was small, so pretty much always empty... I had to order an espresso based drink to get my fix), taking a while to take your order, taking forever to get the check, mixing up dishes, forgetting a side, the whole nine yards. Bartenders and front desk were fine though. All that said, I felt like I got a TON of value out of my FHR benefit for this hotel and would certainly stay here again.
Hotel: IHG Kimpton Clocktower Manchester
Room Booked: Premium Room King
Rate: $288/night (3 nights totalling $1,038.32 after taxes and fees)
Early Check-in: N/A
Late Checkout: N/A
Upgrade: Denied an upgrade as apparently I booked the highest upgradeable room available (which isn't true on their site) and was disappointing. Junior suites were available on their site that would have been = to our room at The Standard but they didn't allow an upgrade into it. So if you book this hotel, make sure you don't waste money on the premium rooms thinking you'll get upgraded still - it seems only the most basic rooms get upgraded to their equivalent here. I wonder if this is an IHG policy in general or just this hotel.
Room Credit: 77 GBP. Works for the breakfast buffet (NOT included), drinks at the bar, or restaurant.
Breakfast: Buffet style, NOT included. For us, we ended up using the credit up entirely on this, which "feels bad" compared to the standard. But as a small bonus, they didn't charge us fully for it? It cost 22 pounds to do, and we did it twice, so between us the total cost should have been 88 GBP. But it appears all of our credit was just hand waved to be for the breakfast buffet. Not sure how this works if we ever decided to buy drinks at the bar.
Comment: Free wine social hour at 5pm, used once when we checked in - surprisingly big pour's. While I'm a little miffed that pretty much the only value we got out of FHR here was a free breakfast (which was included at The Standard), it's hard to argue with the price of the hotel and just how jaw, droppingly gorgeous it is. This hotel feels like the nicest 5-star hotel you can imagine, despite not being one (and there are certainly corners cut that make it more of a 3-4 star experience typical with its price class). Our room was spacious and princely. And the breakfast was genuinely incredible. Same deal as above, full english buffet + continental buffet + free espresso drinks. However unlike the above, service wasn't awful and genuinely everything was fantastic. The selection was also incredibly good too, huge variety of stuff for the continental part and for the full english part you could even pick if you wanted perfectly cooked fried eggs or scrambled. On top of that the espresso was spot on - I didn't need to adulterate it at all. So while it wasn't included for free on top of the FHR credit, I do think it felt worth it. Our room itself was gorgeous but mostly ok. Unlike the standard, you can tell this hotel was designed by committee instead of a strong vision. The "closet" space was full of pointless drawers that got in the way of things and made it mostly unusable. No minibar at all, the coffee nespresso maker wasn't stocked properly. The bathroom fan didn't ever engage so it was a sauna to take a shower. LOUD! This is the worst bit. Our room was along the main entrance and there is a club right outside, plus the train station. Both did not shut up till 3-4AM, and the windows provided hardly any noise insulation from it. While it's cool they are using original windows, and they've "pseudo" double paned them by adding another window on top to preserve the originals... it's no substitution for proper double pane windows. We survived mostly through a white noise generator on the phone. One quirk with this hotel is that AC unit resets every time you leave the room, as in fully off. So if you want to avoid sleeping hot (like we did for the first night), even if it lets you adjust temperature, the AC unit will not actually turn on unless you push the tiny invisible-in-the-dark power button on the top of the thermostat. Which you must remember to manually turn on every time you come back to the room.
Last edited by Lycid; Jun 11, 2024 at 11:59 am