Every year we go to London as my boyfriend is a big fan of London (or at least some of his favourite shops are located there). This year we combined our London trip with a few days in Liverpool as the hotel prices in London where exorbitant due to a big convention in the London Excel convention centre.
For our final night we stayed in London, obviously hotel prices were still rather steep. Luckily we found the Mercure Bloomsbury to have an acceptable price and an unbeatable location. Walking distance from both the Euston (where we would be arriving from Liverpool) and St Pancras (where we would depart from for Brussels) stations and the Covent garden area (for Sam’s shops). As at the time we stayed there, there was a tube strike with no underground services at all we were even happier to have selected this property within walking distance of most of the things we wanted to do.
The hotel is rather anonymous from the outside with no big signage, only a small plaque with Mercure at the side of the entrance. The lobby was rather small, but sufficient for the size of the hotel.
We were immediately checked-in by one of the clerks behind the counter and received a full explanation of the hotel. We were very happy to have our room available to us despite arriving as early as 13:00. They also granted us a later check-out at 12:30.
Our room was a lovely tower room on the 7th (highest) floor. The bed was located in the tower part, a few steps up from the rest of the room, alongside the desk area.
The bed was nice and large but unfortunately only had plug sockets at one side. There were also tea and coffee facilities (with a proper cup coffee machine) and complimentary water cans.
Sam remarked that the room must get quite cold as there were lots of heaters installed, an extra oil heater and of course the air-conditioning unit.
The bathroom was off to the side of the entrance corridor and quite small, but did feature a bathtub with shower combo. They provided the full range of products but some bolted to the wall and others just standing around.
When Sam ran the bath it overflowed as the overflow was clogged, making the water run into the room and soaking the carpet. After a call to the reception someone came up to assess the situation, we received towels to clean up and where offered a different room if preferred. We chose to stay put as we could dry up the mess with the towels and we were there only for 1 night (and another room probably wouldn’t be nearly as charming as our tower room)
In the morning we had breakfast which was included in our room-rate. They offered a rather standard hot and cold buffet with some egg dishes made to order. Exactly the breakfast we would expect from a Mercure.
While the hotel has some really negative reviews online this was totally unwarranted. The hotel was clean, maybe slightly dated and the staff very friendly and efficient. Even the mess of our overflowing bath was swiftly dealt with. We will seriously keep this hotel as an option for our next London visit