citizenM London Bankside — Hotel in London

Not recommended at all! Way overpriced, advertises with facilities they don’t offer, and clearly not a 4 star hotel.

There are other 4 star hotels with better facilities in London. So for me never again.

My mom and I decided to stay here due to the airco and refrigerator in the room. After booking the room we emailed the importance of AC and refrigerator facilities they advertise with, and stress the importance.

Honestly the only plus point is the friendly staff. But the rest is way below par.

Beds are not comfortable at all. The hotel does not have a top mattress or any other solution for the hard and uncomfortable beds. Every 4 star hotel has solutions except this one apparently.

Airconditioning was not working after the first night. We complained about it and after 4 nights were offered a fan that didn’t help. The room was humid and windows could not be openend. My mom collapsed after 5 days and we had to call an ambulance. She hadn’t slept since our arrival due to the humidity in the room.

The refrigerator is a cooling drawer instead. A normal bottle of water cannot be placed standing up.

The WiFi does not work properly. In the lobby it works. But once in the room it doesn’t. Sometimes we did get acces and after some time it stopped. Other times we were not able to connect at all.

The tv does not work properly. Out of the sudden the screen goes black and you keep switching it on several times until you are basically fed up with it.

Rooms are small. But we knew this upon arrival.

The windows cannot open. We knew this too upon arrival, therefore requested a room with a properly working AC and refrigerator.

Several days we were given dirty towels, see pictures. Overall they clean the hotel daily, but they do not clean near the window and neither the shelves in the room which were full with dust and even little insects.

The staff said the hotel was fully booked. In the meantime we saw people checking in and out every day. And the website offered rooms during the period of our stay. Therefore I conclude they were unwilling to switch us to another room.

Therefore they advertise with facilities they do not offer and clearly don’t care about the health of their guests.

We are never staying at a Citizin hotel again and do not recommend them to anyone.

I have stayed at the Mercury in Londen before, they have great beds and offer the facilities...

The staff are very friendly and welcoming and the lobby is great. The location is pretty good (close to plenty of services/tube stations and decently walkable). The rooms are decently nice and I was very excited to try out this hotel but the claims about having AC are completely false and for that reason I would not recommend staying here. We stayed in 2 citizenMs across two weeks and had similar issues in both, with this one being the worst of the two. You are supposed to be able to control the temperature and ventilation speed from the iPad in the room, the lowest temp being 18C. We had all blinds/curtains/lights closed and the AC set to the highest possible setting/lowest possible temp during our entire stay and it was essentially useless. The ambiant temp in the room was in the high 20s the entire time making our stay incredibly uncomfortable. We had to pry the door open when getting ready in the morning, sleep on top of the covers to try and get comfortable, ended up being unable to sleep 3 out of 5 nights, and having to take cold showers midway through the night just to cool down. We brought this up with staff every day and they would simply ask if the blinds were closed and if the AC was set and never offered any other solutions. Keep in mind our stay was in May and it wasn't even hot outside (10-18C on most days throughout our stay). It wasn't until I read a bunch of other reviews that I saw that this was a long term recurring problem and that the hotel keeps on simply apologizing for the discomfort instead of fixing the AC. On the 4th night we requested a fan after seeing that someone else had done that in the reviews, and although the fan helped a little it was still unbearable after a sunny day. On the last day I again called the front desk and asked if there was anything else they could do as the heat was unbearable at that point and I asked if we could be moved to a cooler room/lower floor which they agreed to do. The room was slightly cooler but not by much (still had to sleep without covers and with fan on 24/7). I feel bad for the staff having to apologize all the time for something they can't control, but I also find it pretty odd that I had to come up with solutions on my own to the problem (fan and switching rooms) instead of them offering up any of these solutions when we...

Positives: Check in and check out can all be done by us at reception with the device available which is convenient. They also have an option of us choosing the view of our room which is great. Room is small with very little space to walk around, but the ambience is good with whole room ipad operated. Sitting area in reception is quite big with nice ambience again.

Negatives: I asked reception for portal heater as despite setting the temperature to the highest in my room, I felt cold. I was told that they don't have any portal heaters in their hotel. That's a big surprise as even if we feel cold in the room, there is no alternative options that hotel is able to provide. Would have been helpful if each floor had a drinking water dispenser. Only place where we can get drinking water is ground floor at breakfast area which is very inconvenient if people are not interested in drinking tap water and want water from dispenser. Also the water dispenser in ground floor does not have any notes for each symbol on it. I first pressed a button and the water colour was different. So when I asked their staff they said that's sparkling water and then told me what each symbol means for type of water. Not all of them would know it. Can do with a small note on the side which says what each symbol means in water dispenser. One of those rare hotels where kettle nor coffee/tea sachets are not provided in room. It's so difficult to contact hotel directly and request things prior to our arrival. I wanted to ask for late checkout after 2pm. When I used their chat service and discussed with them, they said they are 'citizenm global guest relations online chat service' and are not in that specific hotel to give any direct advice for me. Then I telephoned the number in their website and got same reply that they are common phone service for all their hotels and cannot give any specific advice on late checkout for my hotel. I was given an email address to contact and they would reply in 3-5days. I have been waiting for over an week now with no response yet. My stay in their hotel itself...