Airport Hotel Review: Renaissance London Heathrow (Marriott).
Hotels are usually, a bit out of the scope of this site (although you can always check the hotel reviews I publish on the sister site Places of Charm).
However, I make an exception when these are quite closely related to the air travel experience. This was the case, for example, of my review of the sleeping pods at Istanbul Airport, which, ok, are not really a hotel, but you get the idea!
This hotel in particular, the Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel, has the airport as its raison-d’être, and most of its guests are either airline crews or people on stopovers at Heathrow.
In fact, the airport is so close to the airport that from some of the rooms and also from some common areas you can even do plane spotting, because the terminals and one of the runways of Heathrow airport are just in plain sight.
so when I had the chance to recently stay there for one night I thought, why not write a review along the same lines of the flight reviews which I post here regularly?
As we shall see, there is plenty to report on!
My impressions of the Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel
To set the tone of this review, let’s start by saying that the Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel is part of the Marriott network, so this, for a start, sets up some initial expectations which, I must say, were not really met.
The Rooms
The Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel is not a particularly comfortable hotel to move around.
The first thing that greets the guest when coming out of the lift is this sort of map layout of the rooms.
Can you tell from it where is your room? or even which direction to take? Seriously…
The whole layout seems unnecessarily complicated, not sure what was in the mind of the architects, but the way the directions are indicated doesn’t really improve things.
Now, let’s go to the little adventures with the rooms. And I write it in plural, because it took three attempts to get a proper room.
The first impression when I got into the first one, which you can see here below, was an overpowering, very pungent camphor smell. Now, I am not particularly sensitive when it comes to the olfactive sense, but in this case it was just too much, even dizziying.
To add salt to the wound, it turned out there was no proper coffee in the room, lots of sachets, but all of them decaf! Yes, I know this is a minor thing, but this is the small details that can be really upsetting when you get to your room tired and have already a less than ideal first impression.
So, I decided to request a change of room. The smell was just too much and, with a bit of luck, I would be able to get some coffee as well!
What happened: go to the reception and wait in line for quite some time. Because, that is another problem with this hotel. It appears to get many groups and if a large one gets in front of you, it can easily block the reception area for a rather long time.
A similar thing happens with the lifts, by the way, which seem to be totally inadequate to handle the sort of people and luggage flows (part of it may be due to half the lifts being out of service, but even if all had been working they seemed quite insufficient to handle the volume of work). Even if the hotel has only three floors, the four lifts are terribly slow and constantly full, to the point that sometimes you need to let several go through as if it was the underground at peak hour.
So, I got a new room, but to my surprise, the door wouldn’t open! I went dow to the reception, waited in line again, got the clerk to swipe the card again, and there I go one more time. Guess what? the door still wouldn’t open.
By. this time, I was getting really upset (I was still carrying my bag all this time, btw, fortunately I was travelling light!). So, had to go back again to the reception and I was given a new room.
The problem this time was that the lift capacity issues were compounded by a huuuge group which blocked all the lift area and onto the lobby with their respective pieces of luggage. Seeing this, I asked for the stairs and a member of staff showed me the way through a service staircase which, at this point other guests were also using, such was the collapse in the lift area!
This time, fortunately, the door opened and finally managed to get into my room!
This time the room didn’t have any weird smell either and was well stocked with proper coffee. The bathroom however, had some stains on the floor which are even visible in plain sight in this pic below.
As per the room itself, it was ok. A couple of positive points after so much criticism: both the desk and the bed were rather comfortable and suited to their respective functions.
Then there is the matter of the thermostat, which you need a PhD to be able to use properly. Now, maybe it’s my European mind that can’t comprehend HAVC systems, but I didn’t manage to make it work as I wanted. Fortunately, the temperature in the room was ok.
And when it comes to the views, unfortunately, the interior courtyard is not as exciting as the runways at LHR! (there were apron views from the window at the end of my corridor, though!)
When it comes to the rest of facilities, the Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel has a couple of restaurants next to the lobby. One of them, which is more of a bar, really, depicted here below, the other I will show it further down this post, is where breakfast is served.
There are also several meeting and conference rooms in the ground and lower ground floors. In the latter you will find the gym, as well. Here I had another moment in which I had to request a member of staff to help me find the stairs because the lift was not working! (and the stairs were not really well indicated because I assume most people just take the lift).
Interestingly there is also a little convenience store in the premises of the hotel, which I guess makes sense considering there are no shops anywhere within walking distance of the hotel and many guests will anyway not go into town during their stopover. A curious detail: there is an umbrella rental service, which is something so far had only seen in Taipei!
Last but no least, the breakfast buffet. And here, I am sorry to report, the general impression was again underwhelming. The variety of options is truly limited outside of the typical English breakfast stuff. And the other items that are offered are not particularly appealing, neither in terms of their presentation nor in their tastiness. The only item that was actually remarkable in a positive sense was the banana smoothie. That’s it.
Our take: honestly, if you have read through you can kind of guess what it is.
This hotel needs a lot of work to fix even basic things. I understand that most of its customers base is transient, people that are here for one night during their stopover and may never return, but, still, I am shocked that this is a Marriott-branded hotel, because it is a chain in which I have usually had a good experience.
For contrast, on a previous occasion in which I spend a night at a Heathrow airport hotel, I stayed at the Premier Inn down the road. Now, if you are not familiar with Premier Inn, it is a brand of budget hotels, so it is nothing pretentious.
On that particular occasion, I think I paid no more than €60 per night, less than half of the standard rate at the Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel. However, I got all the basics well covered in a functional way: lifts that work, rooms that are clean and easy to find and so on.
This is not to endorse this Premier Inn in particular, there are actually a few other hotels run by different international chains near Heathrow airport, but just to illustrate the point that the Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel didn’t meet the expectations in any meaningful way.
