The Westin London City — Hotel in London

Unfortunately we had so many problems staying at this hotel. A catalogue of disasters from start to finish. We were staying for a birthday and asked for connecting rooms which we were allocated on arrival. One of the rooms had a very unpleasant sewage smell coming from the bathroom and due to this the family staying in this room had to move to another room. We had initially asked for connecting rooms as we had a child which we were looking after between ourselves. Very inconveniently they had moved the family with the child to the furthest room away from our original room which made it difficult to manage the childcare situation as we were having to walk across the other side of the floor to reach them. We were also told the room was a slight upgrade , however it was smaller than the original room allocated and an odd shape. Disappointing. At breakfast on the first morning, we had an encounter with an extremely rude waiter, who basically told us to 'move out of his way' while he was trying to deliver food to another table. We were shocked at how we had been spoken to us so we escalated this and the waiter denied using these words, even though we had heard him loud and clear! These were the exact words he used, but chose to lie and became challenging when we called out his rude comments.

Staff were rude and miserable, we had to ask for cutlery and basic things like napkins numerous times. It really spoiled the beginning of our day. Shower is the second room was not working as it should have been, had to call maintainance out for this, again wasted time. Room service was shockingly slow, we were asking for the childs milk and had to call 3 times in the space of 1.5hrs before they actually delivered this to the room and then received bad attitudes and dirty looks from the staff. We wanted to use the Pool area and the allocated time for children in the afternoon is between 2 and 4.30pm. Our child was really looking forward to using the pool and the pool facilities was one of the reasons we chose this hotel for our stay. When we arrived at the pool at 2.05pm, we were told the pool was at maximum capacity and therefore we had to wait until some people left. We ended up waiting 50 mins before we could use the pool facilities. Again, disappointing and wasted time. The most appalling part for us was on our last day when were checking out and waiting for our taxi downstairs. Our child needed to use the bathroom so we had to go back upto the 4th floor (reception area) to use the toilets and unfortunately while using the lift our child caught her hand in the lift door and i had to pull her hand out as it had become trapped. Instantly, she was screaming and crying and out of all the staffed who saw the distress (there were about 4/5), they just watched and did nothing. Only the concierge guy came and asked if everything was ok. I think he must have notified the lady in the kitchen who helpfully bought ice to the bathroom for us. When we left the bathroom after attending to the injury, not one of them asked us if we needed assistance, medical attention or if we were even ok. They just looked at us. Utterly, utterly disgusting. Thankfully we left the hotel at this stage. During the course of this stay we escalated the issues the the General Manger Agnes. Personally, we found him to be fake and fluffy and i think he uses this tactic to try and cover up the REAL issues which seems like he cant be bothered to actually address or deal with. He comes across as though he is listening, taking on board /acknowledging what you are saying, but in actual fact, does nothing, very little about the actual concerns. I have read the same comments from other reviews about Agnes. Overall the hotel is deceptive as you can be deceived by the lovely decor, but the actual experience of the stay is extremely poor. Ive had better experiences staying at the Premier Inn. Would certainly not stay here again. Expensive for the diabolical fake service you receive...

Pretty horrendous hotel experience, I travel frequently across the globe and almost never had such shocking service even from budget hotels when I was a teenager. I rarely leave reviews but felt it necessary to warn others not to stay here unless it's for the location which is the only positive about this place. My complaints are endless and I'll just post a few to give a representation of how bad this stay was. I've stayed here twice this year for about 45 days in total for reference.

Housekeeping was pretty poor doing the bare minimum of making the bed but still leaving rubbish in the room, also I'd have to double check if they actually went if you leave the from after 1pm, constantly notifying reception to make sure my room gets cleaned. Housekeeping also threw away some of my items of clothing and although the reception love to make hollow apologies and fake nice gestures nothing was actually done about this in the end.

We also had somebody at the desk who strenuously didn't want to give us more than two drinking waters a day insisting we pay the extortionate room service £5 for 330ml of water, a real disgrace when you're staying at a supposedly 5* hotel; my first experience of getting limited drinking water at a hotel in my life. This wouldn't even be that bad if it weren't for the fact that they didn't even provide us with two drinking waters per day, so insistent to follow a rule that isn't fulfilled. Even when requesting amenities (not excessively, the bare minimum like toothbrushes) we'd often come home to an empty bathroom and would have to follow up ring reception constantly for little things like this throughout our stays.

The staff also seem to have zero communication with each other, my room constantly being rang about similar pointless topics whilst DND is on. One time somebody literally walked in on us in the morning whilst the DND was on and when we politely asked him to leave he tried to insist on coming in to deliver water now?!?! We extended our stay in London and this was confirmed with reception but again they've failed to process it and tried to kick us out a day early.

They also failed to return my laundry on the first trip this year and so I wrote off the clothes but fortunately when I returned for the second trip I had these clothes returned to me, fortunately my name is relatively unique so I fear for those with more common names because they'd obviously mess this up as well.

It was a constant stress having to deal with the incompetence of this hotel and even more annoying when constant errors would occur and constant hollow apologies would be offered whilst nothing actually gets done. It wouldn't be a huge problem that everybody has been trained to give robotic responses and having no pride in their job if they actually got stuff done but they were useless.

Eventually general manager Andres de Souza at least made an effort to improve our stay and offered what seemed to be a genuine apology, so it wasn't all atrocious, I understand everybody working there is human and when dealing with people in person everybody was polite for example when delivering room service.

The glaring flaws are systemic and in the training rather than with individual people, I left with a sour taste in my mouth about the hotel after an otherwise wonderful trip in this city. I almost never leave reviews which shows how poor it actually was, the location of the hotel is great to get everywhere.

Undoubtedly somebody will reply apologising but nothing will actually be done again which is a common theme with this hotel. Stay somewhere else if you're looking for a nice hotel in London.

FURTHERMORE, I've attempted to email the hotel for a receipt of the hotel bill but have not received a reply. I've added this point on because they care more about responding to reviews with hollow words rather than actually dealing...

The stay here was disappointing. The staff and temperature was cold and unwelcoming. The physical temperature in the hotel was cold throughout, cold in reception, cold in the bar and cold in the bedroom. The stat in the bedroom made no difference. Housekeeping in the bedroom was very slack. The first day it did not happen, and we had to call down to request it twice. There was no amenities in the bathroom, ie cotton buds, makeup remover pads, normal items you expect in a hotel of this standard. I requested these and got once and then no more despite asking. I call this green washing but it is really cost cutting by hotels. Likewise for coffee pods and a herbal teabag (Which I requested instead of black tea in the room) – did not get, asked and we were told two lookalike nespresso capsules was it for the stay. I bought some in the end from the local shop, likewise herbal tea. When have the machine if you don’t provide the capsules, also if you have teabags. Having bought herbal tea bags I then realised there was no kettle and water to make tea. We received one small carton of water per day. I know the expectation was to go to the cold bar and have a hot tea at £6 plus service charge. The room was ok, but a five star should offer turndown, tidy up in the evening and fresh towels. These are minimum offerings when you pay for a nice high-level hotel. None of these offered. We asked the concierge for a recommendation for a restaurant, and he made a booking at an Indian restaurant close by, to say it was abysmal would-be understatement, a dirty cramped place that spilled food over us and we literally could not hear ourselves as we were sitting on top of other guests. The next day he asked how we got on, we advised, he said he would look into it and come back to us – we are still waiting….. So please do your own research on eating options here and don't rely on the concierge. The bar in the hotel (where breakfast was served) was cold and drinks were served somewhat sporadically, no nibbles, crisps etc was offered despite our multiple visits with family. A few rice crackers were offered once. Really, if I am pay £25 for a G&T I expect a little service and something special. On the last night we were there we heard from a very disgruntled barman all the things he didn’t like London, the price of everything, how poorly he was treated by the hotel group etc etc. We didn’t need to know any of this. OH and by the way he said we have another bar on overlooking the river that we could have had drinks at, he ushered other guests out to there and told them all about it and when we asked he said of course its there did you not know???? No actually we didn’t. Training really required on these matters. The costs of London are expensive, but we really thought it was taking the absolute * when the receptionist added the 5% service charge to the rooms that we had booked. This was in addition to all the other service charge added to everything. That is not on at all. It was removed but only after some serious disgruntlement by the member of staff. In conclusion there are other issues, but I do not feel I want to labour points. This hotel is clearly geared up to serve as a large corporate hotel but we were not corporate, we were in London to celebrate...