Can you find me a London hotel room for £120 or less?
Q Can you help me? I need a London hotel for a visit to the theatre in May. I normally stay at the Ibis Earls Court but their prices have doubled to £195. I’ve searched on booking.com but can’t find anything decent under £100 and the majority are over £200. I am happy with a three-star property and don’t really want to pay more than £120.
A London hoteliers of my acquaintance can hardly believe how strongly travel has bounced back after the coronavirus pandemic. Demand for decent city centre properties has soared. Rates at the cluster of Premier Inns in London SE1, stretching from Waterloo to London Bridge, are typically £180 even for a Tuesday night in mid-March – when £120 would be the kind of price I would have expected before Covid. Therefore I propose you choose a Premier Inn (the epitome of three-star properties) in an easy-to-access location by public transport for the West End. The cheapest I could find was just under £100 at the Hogarth Roundabout in west London – a location I would not wish upon anyone. But looking in the opposite direction, I found the Greenwich Premier Inn at exactly £120. The Premier Inn boasts its location is “minutes from the Royal Observatory, Cutty Sark and the panoramic views from Greenwich Park”. Don’t assume you are in the centre of Greenwich: it’s a brisk walk of 15 or 20 minutes to these highlights.
However, west Greenwich makes a good base. There are multiple public transport options close by including three rail stations (Greenwich, Deptford and New Cross) linked to Charing Cross station, which itself is just a five-minute walk from Leicester Square at the heart of Theatreland. These prices are all snapshots, and the exact figures will depend on when you are travelling and how far in advance you are prepared to commit. But with a strong financial incentive to stay outside the heart of the capital, you may as well make a virtue of necessity and get to know more of London. I can promise you Greenwich is a more engaging area than Earl’s Court.
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