Royal Horseguards, London

I stayed here last week for two nights - my boyfriend and I decided to treat ourselves during the Easter break and manged to find a good deal through a hotel booking agency. It was a good deal too as the advertised rates start at £265 per night (not including breakfast) so my first tip is to shop around - we only paid about £100 a night for the room and got the full English breakfast included. We had opted for the "deluxe" room instead of the "standard" or "executive" although the hotel booking agency and the hotel's actual website were not very detailed about the differences between them. As far as I can tell now the "executive" is the top end room, the "deluxe" is a bed and a couple of chairs and the "standard" doesn't really exist...

The hotel is located right across the river from the London Eye and around the corner from Embankment tube station, in a fabulous looking building. When we checked in we were offered the option of upgrading our room to an "executive" or "river view". This would have cost another £25 per night, so we passed.

The room we did get was fine - a bit tired looking and small (being at the end of a funny shaped corridor) but was essentially clean. The room had the usual trouser press, tv (with limited satellite channels) and tea-making facilities (including one bottle of water and one pack of biscuits...). It was also supposed to have air-con but the controls did not work, in fact they just twisted around to no effect. We did ring and tell reception and they said that they would fix it, but by the time we left no-one had, and no-one had told us that it couldn't be fixed. So we were a little warm especially as, for "health and safety" reasons, the windows couldn't be opened.

Breakfast was the only meal we had in the hotel and was served from 7am to a very reasonable 10am. The hotel did have a swanky restaurant and a bar (the menu looked great - main courses were over £25...) Breakfast itself, if you were paying, was about £10 for Continental and £17.50 for the full english. The food was good, served buffet style, and had a wide-selection of cereal, fruit, pastries, cold meats, juices, yogurt, eggs, bacon, sausages and so on. The waiting staff were friendly and efficient, if a little confused when asked for more toast or coffee.

Checking out was easy as we had pre-paid and the corcierge was happy to hold our suitcases after the checking out time so we could do a final bit of shopping.

Most of the people staying in the hotel were from overseas - I spotted a lot of Americans and Australians, but there were a lot of what I would call "posh" people from the UK - people who were extremely well dressed and had chauffeurs pick them up! I woudn't rate the hotel as family friendly as they state that you can only have two people in each room, certainly in ours there was no room for a put-you-up bed or cot. It would become very expensive if your kids have to have their own room.

The hotel does have a gym and spa on the 8th floor but we didn't use it and reception did not tell us about it when we checked in.

Overall I'd recommend it, but only if you can get a cheaper rate and manage to get breakfast included.