To paraphrase Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd, is the W the worst hotel in London? Probably not, because hotels in London can get very, very bad. But for the price, the W is still pretty bad.

And I don't have a lot of room to complain, because I already knew this from reading the nearly universally negative FT reviews. And yet I still chose to stay here, in part because SNAs cleared and in part because I prefer a more modern hotel design than most of the London hotel market offers, and I've never tried the W and have long been curious so decided to bite the bullet. At least now I know for myself that (but for some sort of exceptionally good cash or points rate, anyway) I won't be returning.

As for where I'll go instead, personally I'm a big fan of the Great Northern, and while its rooms are small, you can book the upgraded room categories there for a very reasonable premium in SPG points (and fewer total points per night than the standard room at the W costs, at least at current hotel categories). It doesn't get you as much space as SNAs successfully used as the W would, but I think it probably results in a better experience overall. If my SNAs hadn't cleared at the W that's what I would have done instead. The Sheraton Park Lane is also nice now that it's been renovated, but rates, both in cash and in points, have gone up commensurately.

Location

Leicester Square, along with the nearby Picadilly Circus, comprise "London's Times Square" for lack of a better description, in terms of crowds, American chain restaurants, buskers, tourist traps, and world-class theatre. The W is about the best location you'll find if you want to be right in the heart of that, though whether you do is the more important question.

Access from Heathrow Airport is easy enough on the Picadilly line if you want to economize, but you will have to carry your luggage up a few flights of stairs at either of the nearby stations, Picadilly Circus or Leicester Square. (My other London SPG favorites, the Great Northern and Sheraton Grand Park Lane, are both also on the Picadilly line and offer full escalator and elevator access from platform to street at their respective stations.) By car at off-peak hours an UberX can be cheap, but check traffic first as it can also take much, much longer at busy times. The area around the hotel is a maze of one-way, dead-end, and pedestrian-only streets, so you can also get stuck in traffic snarls easily.

Room

I used SNAs to upgrade to the Marvelous Suite, and I understand the standard rooms are tiny and completely non-functional, so the Marvelous Suite had the advantage of being larger. That is about where my positive comments about the room end.

Oh, and one other positive comment, maybe the suite is better than the standard rooms in this regard but someone else commented that the lights were confusing. I did not find this to be the case -- the suite has a set of master light buttons labeled 1-5 in a few different places including by the bed, where 1 is all lights on, 5 is all lights off, and the others are various intermediate stages. A bit more labeling would have been helpful, but the lighting was otherwise intuitive and easy to operate. The air conditioning was also powerful, maybe even a bit too powerful, but in London the risk of wan AC is high so I'll take it.

On the negative side, we will need bullets:

• The suite layout is odd. You enter through a small hallway which then opens into the large bathroom first, and from there you go through another door into the bedroom. The total combination is definitely a generous amount of space for London, but it's not really a suite -- there is no separate living room. Many Ws this would probably call this exact room a Cool Corner Room rather than a suite. That said, the standard rooms here are reputed to be bad enough that if you are going to stay here anyway, it may still be worth the SNAs to upgrade. (Like many W suites it's not a great setup if you happen to be traveling with a non-romantic companion with whom you don't mind sharing a king bed in order to get the extra space of a suite but from whom you want some bathroom privacy -- but since the shower door closes fully and is opaque, it's actually relatively workable, as long as neither of you wants to take a bath while the other one might want to enter or leave the suite.)
• There is a small sitting area in the bedroom, but the sofa is as comfortable as if you stacked up a bunch of phone books and covered them in low-quality velvet. There is also a real desk and chair in the bedroom, which I understand the standard rooms don't have.
• The bed was fine but definitely not as comfortable nor as plush as beds I'm used to at other Ws.
• In the UK, you are not allowed to have any regular power plugs in the bathroom -- which gets tricky in a bathroom as large as this one. Most hotels will offer a special lower-voltage shaver power plug in the bathroom, but there was not one here as far as I could find. And most hotels will compensate for the lack of plugs in the bathroom by having an obvious place to use a blow dryer in the bedroom -- the Great Northern has a large miror with plug halfway up the side right outside the bathroom, for example. Here, not only was there no conveniently located plug, but in a very un-W-like move, there were also few mirrors in the bedroom at all. Very poorly thought out.
• There are also lots of USB power ports situated around the room, about half of which worked.
• Other design features in the bathroom included locating the tissue box inches off the ground on the lowest of a series of awkward shelves under the sink, but I'm sure ground-level tissues are some sort of English tradition I just don't appreciate as a crass American. The WC has motion sensor-triggered lighting, which is great at night. The shower was okay, but the rainfall showerhead water pressure was weak, the door opened in a way that made it hard to have a towel placed outside, and the shower leaked across the floor regardless.
• The refrigerator is one of those auto-charge minibar things without any room whatsoever to squeeze in any of one's own items, which I hate at all hotels as a matter of principle. (This particular one was also set up so that the small bottle of Champagne was in a spring-loaded slot right in front of the small bottle of white wine, so I'm not sure if it was even possible to get the white wine without paying for the Champagne.) At current exchange rates if paying in dollars, the minibar prices were ... not as unreasonable as you might imagine for a W in the center of London.
• The suite did have a Nespresso machine. That's actually a positive comment, but this list had gotten so long I got carried away with it.
• And then there was the noise. This will need sub-bullets:
  • The suite overlooked Leicester Square, and when we first got into the room it was Saturday afternoon and the square was busy with tourists, buskers, street performers, and so forth. You could hear it all in the room as if the windows were open ... and I quickly discovered that one of the windows had a very poor seal such that I was able to stuff towels behind the side of the window, which helped only a tiny amount with the noise.
  • (There isn't really any reason for the windows in this hotel to be openable at all, which would help with the noise regardless -- they tip open slightly, but then there is another separate glass shield that encases the building about a half-meter out, so you can't even really get any fresh air flowing into the room. And the AC is powerful. So just make the windows not open.) 
  • But then, the second night I noticed that the room was much quieter and the gap behind the window was gone -- so I'm not sure if the window just wasn't closed correctly (I tried opening and closing it a few times the first night), or if housekeeping noticed my stuffed towels and called maintenance to fix the window. Either way, once the window was closed properly you could barely hear the street noise outside, which was a big improvement.
  • BUT THEN, upon waking up on Monday morning there was a bunch of banging and construction-like noises starting as early as 6 or 7am. There was a construction site across the street, but it sounded like the noise was coming from inside the hotel. Our room on the southeast side of the 4th floor was right above where I believe the currently-under-renovation nightclub space is, so I'm not sure if that was causing the noise? If so, they really shouldn't have been starting so early, and it does not bode well for how much noise would leak from the nightclub into this room once the nightclub reopens.

Platinum Breakfast

The hotel has a surprisingly good platinum breakfast offering, which was probably the best thing about it in my experience. 

You have the choice between room service breakfast and breakfast in the restaurant (Burger and Lobster) downstairs, but you have to choose one or the other for the duration of your stay. Room service is avaialble until 11:00 while the restaurant is available only until 10:30, and room service includes a hot dish while the restaurant is only a set continental menu, so it seems to me that the room service option easily dominates, but maybe I am missing something.

The room service option is handled by giving you a set of door hangers, one for each day of your stay, that you put out the night before with your options selected. The offering is quite generous, including each of a hot and cold beverage, toast or pastries, a fruit dish, and a hot main dish for up to 2 people per room. (There isn't a totally obvious convention for setting up 2 separate orders on the same card, but I included some notes where needed and it all worked out.) Ordering all of the same stuff from the regular room service menu would run around £30 per person. 

Everything is delivered with a £0 total bill to sign that includes a line for a gratuity -- not sure what would be expected there but I left £5 each day since presumably the included service charge on a regular room service delivery of this amount is at least that much.

(The Great Northern has arguably a better platinum breakfast treatment since you can pretty much order anything from their restaurant menu, but there is definitely something to be said for the convenience and time savings of having breakfast from room service.)

The options as of my stay were: