The Villa Kensington — Hotel in London

This hotel is a three star budget hotel located a few minutes walk from the Kensington museums, that being the natural history museum, The science museum and the V&A museum. It’s also a couple of minutes walk to Gloucester Road tube station.

I managed to pick up a couple of nights here mid week for £65 per night and, because I booked direct, complimentary continental breakfast was included in the price.

I was greeted warmly at reception and although it was before noon and check-in time is 3 pm the guy on reception said he would endeavour to get my room available ASAP and would store my suitcase while I had a look around the area. He also offered to call me when my room was ready, which turned out to be 12:30 pm. So very impressed with that.

The room itself (406) had relatively modern fixtures and fittings. I’d booked a single room, so it had a comfortable single bed with decent quality linens. The room is modest in size but without feeling particularly cramped, not one you’d want to spend much time in but when you’re out all day and really want somewhere to shower and sleep it’s perfectly adequate. The room has tea and coffee making facilities, a small but sharp and clear TV, hairdryer, writing desk and chair, wardrobe with mini safe inside (the mini safe isn’t screwed down, so partially defeats the object of having one). Four ceiling spotlights make the room quite bright, this is complimented with a bedside lamp and a flexible reading lamp, so reading in bed isn’t an issue. The room has Aircon. The complimentary WiFi is a bit slow by today’s standards but useable.

The bathroom is compact, modern but perfectly serviceable with a rain shower. Shower gel, shampoo and soap are provided (but disappointingly in single use plastic tubes). A modest sized bath towel was provided but no hand towel.

For those light sleepers you could clearly hear people in other rooms and the windows are not double glazed. That said it’s on a relatively quiet side road so I didn’t hear much noise and got a good nights sleep.

The continental breakfast is served in the basement in a decent sized room and contains the usual fare e.g. cereals, pastries cold meat and cheese. Coffee and juice is also available and a water cooler is available for complimentary use in reception 24/7. As a complimentary item the breakfast was perfectly adequate, however, the normal price is £7 which in my opinion is too high when, for instance, The Hub offer a similar Breakfast for £6 which includes hot bacon, sausage and scrambled egg.

From an accessibility perspective, the hotel has a lift but I think it would’ve been touch and go if a wheelchair could fit through the door of the room I had. Prospective guests with mobility issues should check direct with the hotel to ensure their needs can be met.

In many ways this is the Ronseal of hotels, it does exactly what it says on the tin. All the basics are there, the staff are pleasant and helpful, the rooms are comfortable and clean. I would certainly stay here again if I could get it for a...

This is one of the worst experiences I ever had in an hotel. The rooms are small and old, the bathroom can't be smaller.. they don't make your bed and the carpet is disgusting. The worst of it is the lady at the front desk working in the afternoon Friday/Saturday/Sunday... from the very beggining in our check in she was acting weird... like something was off with her, she was not making herself understandable so I asked 2 times for a bigger bed and suddenly she started crying and saying things that were not making any sense... my family was scared by her behabiour.... Next day we asked for a taxi at the reception and she called 2 taxis from Kensington & Chelsea LTD company, she asked for our room number and nothing else, when we were arriving to our destination they told us that we couldn't pay with credit card and that we had to call someone for help because we didn't have a local number (she never warned us about this) we called her and she said that she didn't know anything about this so she HUNG UP ON US! She didn't even try to help us. For real, the experience with her during those days was very traumatic... everytime we were going through the recepcion she was doing crazy eyes to us.... After all this days and the crazy things she was doing to us, at the very end, with our luggage going out of the hotel, she started to speak in spanish!! (my family doesn't speak english so they were not able to speak with her and she was just speaking in english to them) .... she knew how to speak our language throughout our stay but she decided not to use it... something is not okay with this woman. The hotel is not good, old, small and not very clean but the MAIN reason of my...

(Update - much to my surprise Agoda redeemed themselves somewhat by offering points or a refund of one night's chargeback to my credit card. So good on them). Terrible, horrible! We booked online based on reviews and misleading photos. Upon arrival ( and after our reservation went firm with no refund possible) we were taken to a horrid musty room in the basement which stank of pesticide odour. The only window we could open was onto a publicly accessible area, therefore it was entirely UNSAFE to open the window and therefore WE COULD NOT BREATHE! Staff entirely unhelpful - tried to convince us the room was safe and insinuated that we should advised the hotel that we had 'delicate' breathing. We insisted that he call his manager ( Chiro) who was also unhelpful. They did say they would try to provide a different room for the second day of our booked stay but that we had no option for the first night other than that disgusting room. Priceline and Agoda were USELESS when we reported the situation and requested some financial compensation. We had stayed 5 nights at another London hotel, ( St Giles) same price point, and it was just fine - Villa Kensington was 1000 times worse. Totally unacceptable. A health and safety Hazard. We will report to all London authorities we can think of. NEVER BOOK THIS PLACE!!...