Apologies in advance for this rather long review... Don't say you weren't warned, it's an epic...

THE FACILITIES

They advertise that the rooms are sound proofed (I'll discuss that point later). The rooms have irons and ironing boards and hairdryers and occasionally bathrobes and slippers.

There's an American themed Sports Bar & Café where you can have a drink, dine casually and watch a range of sports on a large screen. The Sage restaurant is more formal and is an all day restaurant. If you want to have an even more expensive drink in relaxing surroundings you can use the Skybar which is available to guests to have a drink by the bar except on Friday evenings when it closed to guests unless they attend the Mumbai Nights event. This is an Indian themed evening, free entry for ladies before 10pm and £15 for gents or £25 entry after 10pm for everyone. This gets you entry to the event and a voucher to get some Indian buffet type snacks supplied by a local restaurant called Madhu's.

MY EXPERIENCE

We had attended the Mumbai Nights event on previous occasions and wanted to invite some friends down to have a drink and celebrate with us at this event. I booked the hotel through priceline.co.uk over a week before we stayed there. I called the hotel directly to ask for a quote and they quoted me £79 a night for a classic room and £15 a night for parking. I said I had paid considerably less than that booking through a third party last year and they said I was welcome to book it through someone else. I found their attitude somewhat rude but had read in a review somewhere that you could book through priceline. Anyway I booked online through priceline and got a double classic room for 2 nights for £133.96 and they quoted me £12 a night for parking. I booked the room online and in the "special requests" box I stated that it was our wedding anniversary. The room rate was including taxes and service charge but not breakfast. The email confirmation stated that check-in time was from 13:00 onwards and that we must check out by 13:00. They accept American Express, Diners Card, Master Card and Visa for payment and advised that cancellations must be advised before 18:00 on the day of arrival. Priceline were quite helpful in also providing directions to the hotel.

We thought we'd have a relaxing few hours in bed and have a nap before we got ready for our friends popping over in the evening for a drink and switched on the TV. The welcome screen we had noticed on previous stays did not display and more than half the channels weren't working. We weren't going to bother complaining about that as we hadn't come to a hotel to watch TV all weekend. The one thing I had to complain about, though, was the room temperature. It was excessively warm and the air-conditioning seemed to be very noisy but totally ineffective. I called guest services and they said I had to turn the "boost" off as this was for heating not for cooling! I thought that was rather odd as we had it set for the lowest temperature possible of 15 degrees. We showered and tried to have a nap but kept hearing people talking in the corridor and some rather loud noises which we could figure out what they were. About 6pm we decided to get showered again and get dressed for our friends to arrive. Within minutes of getting out of the shower we found we were almost sweating in the heat. It was like being on a tropical holiday! It had been a pretty warm day outside but we couldn't fathom why it was so warm. My husband doesn't particularly like complaining and I was trying not to let anything spoil our weekend. I sent hubby to the ice room to fill up the ice bucket and we poured ourselves some drinks and waited for our friends to arrive. About 6 friends came up to our room including my brother and they had brought champagne as gifts, we were drinking champagne and they toasted our anniversary when at about 9pm there was a knock at the door, I went to see who it was and there were 2 suited chaps from the hotel there saying we were making a lot of noise. I was very embarrassed and apologised and told the others that obviously we were talking too loud and we should keep it down. We went down to the Mumbai Nights event at 9.45pm where another 6 or 7 friends met us. I was rather tipsy so have very little recollection of how many drinks I had but the only time I ordered from the bar I do recall it was 3 vodkas with mixers which came to over £22 (I charged it to my room). The evening was a success, everyone had a lovely time and we went up to our room at 2am, tired from all the dancing but happy.

STARTERS/LIGHT BITES/SANDWICHES
Soup of the day - £7
Spinach & goat cheese tarte - £10
Cheese & tomato Panini - £11
Penne with creamy mild mushroom ragout - £15
Chicken Caesar salad - £11
Greek salad - £10
Skyline Burger - £11
Focacia club sandwich - £11
Hot & spicy chicken wings - £11
All day brunch - £17

SIDES
French fries - £4
Buttered spinach - £4
Mixed salad -£4

When we had checked in they had told us check out time was 12:00, I showed them the booking confirmation I had which said 13:00 and they said this was not always possible. At any rate we checked out before 12:00 anyway. There was a notice at reception saying it was £20 for each additional 2 hours if you wanted to stay later. I was asked on checking out if everything was satisfactory. I told them that it wasn't, and mentioned how many times we'd been disturbed and how many times the lift had bothered us and the drilling at one stage and how hot the room had been. They said the room was hot because we'd asked for a pool view room and there was no ventilation in those rooms. Why had they not advised us of this when we checked in? I was told that they would put a note on my "profile" for the next time we stayed so that we were given a room with windows. I said it didn't matter I didn't think we'd be staying there again. They did not seem to care. The only bargain we got was that they charged us just £12 instead of £24 for parking which seemed to be a mistake on our bill which I wasn't going to point out. I would also mention that I had specifically had to ask for us not to be disturbed on the Sunday morning with phone calls as the previous year we had started getting silent calls from 7am in our room - someone mentioned to me later on (who works in the travel industry) that some hotels do this to see if people have vacated the room so they can send the cleaners in to get the rooms cleaned and ready for the next guests. We received 4 or 5 silent calls last time we stayed during the Sunday morning and I made a point of telling reception not to put any calls through under any circumstances. My husband and I both have

Pictures of Sheraton Skyline Hotel - London Heathrow Airport

The Skybar

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And before you ask or recommend me to do so - I have already fed back my concerns over our stay to the hotel - let's see what, if anything, they do about it. At the time we were rather disappointed with the hotel but because we thoroughly enjoyed the Friday evening (which is more to do with our friends being there to celebrate with us than the hotel providing a good service to its guests), we did not feel the weekend was a total disaster. I can imagine it wouldn't be that much fun for people staying in the hotel who did not attend the Friday evening event having people staggering back to their rooms at 2am (which we made a point of being very quiet so as not to disturb others). If you like that sort of thing Mumbai Nights itself is an event well worth attending, good music and a good crowd of people all very smartly dressed enjoying a night out in a pretty decent looking pool bar and function room.

I've received an email from the General Manager of the Sheraton Skyline kindly offering to refund our bill for 2 nights stay and the car parking bill. I will paste their response below once I've received the refund on my credit card and let you judge for yourself if you feel they have redeemed themselves...

I am in receipt of the email you have sent to our Reservations Manager, Eva Kaptan concerning the comments/review you have recently posted to travel.ciao website following your stays at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel.

Secondly, I would like to share with you my findings based on my investigation with the Department Managers. Please accept our very sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused. I understand you had booked your room (16-18/03 stay) through a third party, the fax confirmation we had received from the booking company did not state that it was your wedding anniversary. For future information, the check-in time is at 2pm and check-out time is at 12pm. Car parking is charged at £12 per night for in-house guests and I am unable to explain why you were quoted £15 when you called the hotel directly. I have noted that the times stated in the confirmation email sent to you by the booking party does not match with ours, therefore we will be highlighting this to them and will ask them to amend the incorrect information in their database, thus helping us to avoid any future inconvenience for our customers. Some of our smoking rooms do have bath but due to availability with pool view at the time of your check-in the best smoking room we had with a pool view was ****. However should we have known that the room was unsuitable at the time of your stay, we would have immediately looked at alternatives for you. We did have a technical problem with our key card machine on 17th of March which might have been be a possible reason as to why your key card did not work the first time. The fault was reported back to the supplier and was rectified immediately.

Thank you for highlighting our food/beverage prices, I would like to kindly inform you that we regularly carry out competitive checks within our market and our prices are in line, if not better, than the other properties.

Jirayr Kececian | General Manager - Sheraton Skyline Hotel"

On arrival at the hotel there were police cars and vans everywhere as there had been an incident earlier in the day when a policewoman had been run over. This was nothing to do with the hotel but they were co-operating fully with the police who had cordoned off part of the main road and had police tape all over the place. The hotel ensured that this investigation caused the minimum of disruption to hotel guests and we parked in the car park as normal and checked in. The regular check in desk had a bit of a queue so we were offered to check in at the "executive" desk check in (can't recall what it was called) but it was nice that they tried to keep the waiting time for check in to a minimum. The receptionist checking us in asked if we had stayed before and when I gave my name I felt immediately that there was a note against my name as suddenly the receptionist became even more polite and friendly.

We were also given a complimentary late check-out for 2pm which was nice so we didn't have to rush downstairs to get checked out at the same time as everyone else at midday.