Bob W London Olympia

The location is great, but the hotel was one of the worst I’ve stayed in, and I wouldn’t recommend it. The rooms were excessively hot, with little ventilation when the street-side window was shut. Facilities were poor, and the elevator was broken for our entire stay with no effort to fix it. The AI support bot gave completely wrong answers, and having no human available to help was a major flaw. I’d rate the overall experience 3/10.

The only good part of my stay was the other guests, who were friendly and quiet. Everything else matched the unfavorable reviews I’d found after booking through Airbnb and checking Google directions: filthy hallways, tiny rooms, hard beds, an overly hot room, and no chair or desk. The carpets were filthy from the moment I walked in. The customer “service” seemed to be an AI bot or a string of prewritten messages over WhatsApp or email. My room had a burnt-out light and dirty dishes, which I reported on WhatsApp right away. The next day someone had moved the dishes around without cleaning them, and nobody ever replaced the bulb. After checkout, Bob W kept emailing to ask how they could make it a five-star stay. Customer service after the fact doesn’t fix it. They lost that rating as soon as I saw the dirty carpets.

The room was modern, clean and quiet, but it was boiling hot and there was no air conditioning. I found it annoying to use my phone to unlock the door, and it often failed, so I had to keep contacting staff for remote help. Most of the time there was nobody in the building. Breakfast was at a coffee shop five minutes away, not on site.

Getting moved from the first room was a mission because there was no human contact, only WhatsApp. It was on the lower ground floor, with a broken window lock and no burglar bars, so someone could come down the stairs from the street and climb in through the window. The second lower-ground room was clean, and its windows locked and had burglar bars. But the view was garbage bags in the rubbish area, brooms and other things. The bathroom was absurdly small: the toilet seat didn’t fit the toilet properly, and I kept slipping off. There was only about 25 cm of space, so I had to hold the basin and slide onto the toilet. The shower opening was so narrow you had to turn sideways to get in. A man or larger person wouldn’t fit through it. Carrying luggage down the steep, narrow steps was unpleasant too. From inside, the door looked too small for its frame, and when the corridor light was on, I could see it through the door along with the two locks.