Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London

Amazing hotel and Stay . Excellence of service exceeded our expectations ! The Mandarin junior suite is lovely. All restaurants & hotel facilities : pool / fitness were great. Thank you we will definitely come back at our favorite hotel in london.

The welcome from the excellent staff, the fabulous suite, the ambience within the property and the attention to detail were exceptional. A truly memorable experience in a superb hotel, excellent location in the heart of London. Thanks for making our visit so wonderful.

A hotel this expensive, this famous, this iconic, should be perfect. There is no room for mistakes and unhappy guests. It's not like any three star hotel on any high street - there, you would not expect perfection. We were so disappointed with Mandarin Oriental! I would say appalled, but you have to understand that the rating is directly connected to the price! We paid a good months salary for a long weekend - three nights that turned into two nights - at the Mandarin Oriental, Hyde Park. We had been looking forward to a wonderful, romantic weekend in London for a long time, and decided to really splash out and get the most luxurious Junior Suite at the most beautiful five star hotel imaginable. Stupidly, we imagined a large and airy suite with the plush and scintillating beauty you'd expect in an Edwardian landmark. Stupidly, we thought a Junior Suite would have a high ceiling and lovely latticed, classical English windows. What we got for a months salary was a gloomy, dark, ugly, grey cellar of a room, sort of rectangular, with horrible, grey, hard, modern and extremely uncomfortable furniture (you know the kind of chair that hurts your legs when you sit in it for more than five minutes). It turned out the cellar-like windows did not really open, and anyway, the "view" was of the grey wall of a house that seemed like it was one foot from our wall. The window was furthermore half covered on the outside by a box filled with plastic plants. You cannot imagine how dark it made our room! The rectangular shape of the room meant that to cross it, you banged your legs on the harsh corners of the rock hard coffee table and the even harsher corners of the bed. We were covered in bruises after two days with this. The bed frame was larger than the mattresses, which meant the mattresses moved about on the frame and there was a largish gap between the mattress and the headboard, which made for disturbed sleep. One sink in the bathroom was clogged and the dirty water just stood there. The morning paper we were offered was the wrong one (they just put any paper on our door, not bothering to check our order, obviously). The air in the room was stuffy and breathing was rather laboured, so we slept very badly, since, if we opened the grimy little windows one crack, there was a terrible noise all night from a large machine of some sort just outside. I could go on, but the worst thing was the darkness, the grey, depressing ugly gloom of the room, which emanated from the oppressingly low ceiling, the awful grey decor, the vile plastic lamps that seemed to be adding to the darkness, all of which was probably supposed to be modern and quirky, but was just painfully misplaced in a classic building like this. There was not a splash of colour in the room, not even a picture. The service was not on top, either. At least a month before we arrived, we mailed the concierge (or so we thought) to get some theatre tickets booked. This turned out to be extremely complicated, the mail bounced about and one person did not seem to know what the other person did. We were asked over and over again to write a new mail with the same old info about what play, what venue, what date and what time we wanted. It took at least five-six mails and for days there would be no reply whatsoever. When they finally got it right, they still charged a 5% fee for the booking, with many apologies for the trouble. We should have known then, that this was not a top service kind of place. We asked the concierge to book a table in the hotel's own restaurant (should not have been too troublesome), but when we got there, all dressed up, there was no booking, she had obviously not bothered, and we got bad seating as a result. The only thing that was consistant in this place was how they made us pay and pay. The exorbitant cost for the dark cellar room did not include breakfast! We tried the breakfast buffé one morning, and my, did they make us pay for that mistake! The coffee was not included! And when we asked for an extra cup of the rather awful, cheap filter coffee, they charged extra, so two extra items on the already steep breakfast bill, because we got a little extra coffee. There was no hot breakfast included in the expensive breakfast bill, either - yes, you guessed it: want some scrambled eggs? it will cost you extra! The buffé was ok, but at that price we should have got more. It consisted of the cold breakfast items you would get in any three/four star hotel. Deeply disappointed, we changed our plans and left one day early. This meant that they could sell our room to somebody else, which I'm sure they did. Of course, there was no refund for the extra day and night. They did not even comp the coffee. They expressed, however, that they were so sorry to see us leave in advance. They were also sorry that they didn't get us the morning paper they had promised; however, they did not give us the morning paper we asked for. But then, we are not the sort of guests that rant and rave and make a scene. No, we were polite and mild mannered and that got us exactly nothing as compensation. We have travelled all over the world, literally for decades, and stayed at all kinds of hotels, from the simplest B&B:s to the swankiest luxury resorts imaginable. But never, in all our experience, has the ratio of cost and quality been so off.

We always pop into the Mandarin Bar when in Knightsbridge and it never fails to impress. Love the iconic smell when you walk through the doors having been welcomed by the doormen. The huge mantelpiece at the top of the stairs is always beautifully decorated in keeping with the season. The Autumn display was gorgeous. It really makes an impression when someone remembers you from a few weeks ago (bearing in mind the number of guests who would have visited the bar) thank you to Orlando (Ass Bar Manager) for doing so and for exemplary service during the afternoon. We are certainly looking forward to returning in a few weeks to enjoy the spectacular Xmas decor.

There is no doubting the excellence of this hotel. The most important aspect of this place is the quality of the staff. They are friendly, helpful and above all they smile. The hotel itself has been extremely well refurbished and maintained, the quality of the rooms, and the beds, linen and bathrooms is high. HOWEVER, the presence of shampoo and soap in fixed plastic bottles in the shower and the bath is not even third rate. If I wanted to remove the shampoo why shouldn’t I, I have paid for it! Breakfast was excellent, however some should learn how to fry an egg.