Holiday Inn London-Heathrow, London

...a points holder with the Holiday Inn group, there was nothing to compare for price with booking the room on the Pigsback link to Holiday Inn.
While Holiday Inn guarantee the best price online, Pigsback offer a 1500 point deal which equates to another £15 discount.

Booking is always easy with the Holiday Inn group, and the price was £56.40 before the Pigsback points – effectively, then, £41.40.
As always with the InterContinental ...
...
There are three Holiday Inn venues in the Heathrow area, and it is worth careful checking to see which is closest to your departure terminal.
I confess to slackness here – or an extremely hectic lifestyle – which resulted in me choosing, quite accidently, the best option for our departure from Heathrow. It is a ten minute taxi ride form the hotel to the terminal door.
I was less clever in terms of our arrival at the hotel. We ... more

I have not had to sleep at airports all that often - either in the terminal, nor nearby. After all, if you are flying out of Belfast, home is never that far from either of our airports.
However, a recent long-haul flight from Heathrow required arrival in terminal 2 at around 4.00 am. With a journey to South America ahead there was no chance of trying to make do with a kip on a terminal seat.
We needed a good hotel nearby.

1 Booking

As a regular customer of Pigsback.com and a points holder with the Holiday Inn group, there was nothing to compare for price with booking the room on the Pigsback link to Holiday Inn.
While Holiday Inn guarantee the best price online, Pigsback offer a 1500 point deal which equates to another £15 discount.

Booking is always easy with the Holiday Inn group, and the price was £56.40 before the Pigsback points – effectively, then, £41.40.
As always with the InterContinental Hotel Group, the confirmation email was prompt, and the whole transaction was straightforward.

2 Location

There are three Holiday Inn venues in the Heathrow area, and it is worth careful checking to see which is closest to your departure terminal.
I confess to slackness here – or an extremely hectic lifestyle – which resulted in me choosing, quite accidently, the best option for our departure from Heathrow. It is a ten minute taxi ride form the hotel to the terminal door.
I was less clever in terms of our arrival at the hotel. We were having to travel from Gatwick to Heathrow around rush hour in the evening. The National Express coach offered us any terminal in Heathrow that we wanted. Having failed to check exactly where the hotel was in relation to the terminals, I alighted at Terminal 4 and asked a taxi driver to complete the journey for us.
The cost of that mistake was a £23 taxi fare, whereas the unearthly hour taxi drive next morning, was only £9.

3 Arrival

One of the appeals of Holiday Inn for me has been arrival and checkout.
Once again, this was first class. We were seen immediately, were recognised by the system right away, and were on our way to the room within a couple of minutes.

4 Room

I am well aware that chain hotels can suffer from a certain ‘sameness’.
So there was nothing that took our breath away when entering this room.
Neither did we want or need anything to take our breath away.
Everything was there that we needed.
There was a king size bed - and for me that is appreciated. It would be the last time for three weeks that I would go to bed with my feet fully supported. Shorties among you have no idea what it is like to have to sleep with feet and ankles flopping out the bottom of the bed.!
There were plenty of pillows and even choices of the firmness that I preferred – if I want that at home, I have to go and buy my own.!
There was a minibar, and tea and coffee making facilities, TV, good shower, iron, ironing board, room safe, and toiletries.

5 Eating

As I had no intention of eating breakfast at 4.00 am, our eating experience was limited to an early evening meal in the restaurant on the ground floor.
We expected to pay dearly for a main meal of the day, but had good news – and bad news.
The good news was that early birds can enjoy their buffet for £14.95. We were given a good welcome in the restaurant, and had all the options well explained.
The buffet was not the best I have ever enjoyed – for that you should read a recent review I did of Villa D’Aldeia in Brazil. But it was far from the worst. The service was fine, the starters were good, the mains were satisfactory and the desserts were very good.
The bad news was at the till. The bill should have been just shy of £30 with a couple of pounds extra each for ciders. Instead, I got a couple of pence back from £40. A discretionary service charge had been added without letting us know.
If I had not been so keen to get to bed early and get a decent amount of sleep before the alarm went off, I would have got stroppy. Instead, I made the head waiter see a bit of my annoyance, and a very deliberate pocketing of the tip I was about to leave !

6 Sleep.

The room was well sound proofed, and I slept as well as I ever do on those occasions when I know there is an absolute necessity not to sleep through the alarm.

7 Extras

There were a couple of particular touches that I really liked.
The first was the willingness of the concierge to book a taxi for us. There is a shuttle bus that calls at the hotel, but the concierge helped me to think through the issue by mentioning that the bus is £5 each, whereas a taxi would be £9 for the two of us.
Secondly he offered his wisdom on the need to arrive in the terminal at 4.00am.
He assured us that we had been misled and 4.45 would be ample time to check in.
He booked the taxi for 4.30, called us when it arrived, and we were at the airport check-in for 4.45. The Air France staff only arrived at the desk at 5.00 am, and you can imagine how thankful we were that we had not been standing there for an hour already.

8 Check-out.

As usual, when we got up in the morning – at 4.00 am – there was a letter put under the door, thanking us for our stay, confirming the charges and their payment.
Checkout took 30 seconds, time to wave the said letter at the desk personal as we headed for the taxi.

No-one could have made a sleep at the airport any more pleasant or comfortable, unless they had developed a drug which puts you to sleep the instant you touch the pillow, with a guarantee you will hear the alarm and respond immediately in the morning.

I will not even consider another hotel in the same circumstances in the future. 

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