Hotel in London

Unlike me, Brendan is very good at doing online research when it comes to purchasing electronic goods or booking hotels. He has the patience and tenacity to go through countless pages of reviews, comparing prices, assessing quality, and finding good locations. I just want to look at the pictures.

He did it again for our stay in London last week - he found a bijou hotel on Sussex Gardens, in the Paddington area (very handy when you're getting the Heathrow Express from the airport).

From the outside, the Shaftesbury Metropolis London Hyde Park hotel (a bit of a mouthful) looks like all the other small hotels on Sussex Gardens, a quiet road 5 minutes from Paddington station.

When you step in, the reception area is bright and modern. The rooms are small, very small, but perfectly formed. A nice bed (mattress too soft for my liking, but lovely light duvet on top), wardrobe with a safe, flat-screen television, hair-dryer, space for a small suitcase. The air-conditioning was efficient and the room felt cosy. And the soundproofing was good. The windows are single-glazed, so you do get some of the traffic noise, but the insulation between the rooms must be very good, as we didn't hear any of our neighbours.

And a modern bathroom (I've seen smaller, I'm sure), with powerful shower with 2 heads - a big head in the ceiling and a smaller hand-held one (though, on the last morning, the water was way too hot), cute little sink and a loo where you can sit straight (I hate loos where you have to turn sideways because it's too close to the wall). And shower gel and shampoo bottles that I would have loved to take home with me, except we had no checked-in bags and I would have had to carry them in those little transparent plastic bags you have to use to get through airport security these days.

Location was excellent - less than 10 minutes' walk from Paddington station, and about the same distance to Lancaster Gate tube station at the entrance to Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park. Easy walking distance through the park to Exhibition Road with the Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum etc (It's uphill on the way back though!). On our last day, we walked to Marble Arch and Oxford Street, and back - that was quite an easy walk. There are plenty of ethnic restaurants in the area. The Satay House was 2 minutes away. And Paddington station has plenty of breakfast alternatives (we didn't have breakfast included in our package), including 2 mini-supermarkets selling fruit salads and juices for those of us who can't take dairy or wheat products.

Service was OK - We didn't have much interaction with staff, so it's hard to say. We had to wait for our room to be ready (checkin at 2 pm), which meant we couldn't go too far on the first day. On the last day, we left our suitcase at the hotel after checkout (free service), and the attendant could not find it when we came back for it later in the day. He had 2 rooms full of suitcases, and had not asked us what it looked like. He would have had no hope of finding it. He had very little English, and after I had expressed my frustration with the wait, the receptionist told us to go with him to find it, which we did within 2 minutes of course. Not a good last impression, but the overall stay was good, and the price was good too, so I would definitely go back