SACO Holborn - Lamb's Conduit St

The service was really great, and the price is decent for London compared with hotels or Airbnb. The building is ideally placed in the city centre, near shops, restaurants, and a train station, so you can explore London on foot. The street is calm, and the bedrooms face the back, so there was no noise at all. Our apartment was quite large and very convenient, though not as cosy as we'd hoped. The kitchen was handy. The carpet and couch were a bit dirty, and it was hard to set the heaters because the thermostats seemed broken. I had the two-bed bedroom, and the bed felt small and wasn't very comfortable.

Finding serviced apartments in London can be difficult, so I'm glad we found SACO Lambs Conduit. The rooms were fairly spacious and comfortable, and we had no major cleanliness or service issues. It's well located for central London, and the apartments have what you need for light cooking or warming up ready meals from nearby convenience stores. A couple of small things came up. One room's TV had some problems. We could have told the front desk sooner, but my fellow guests weren't bothered, so we only mentioned it at checkout. The fridge in another room had been switched off and smelled as a result. I only needed it for milk and canned drinks, so it wasn't a big problem for me, but it could have been otherwise. Management could disable the fridge/freezer switch, or at least put up a sign asking visitors not to turn them off. As far as I know, they don't use much power once they reach the right temperature, so there's no reason to shut them down. Those two things were minor, though. Service apartments always have a few rough edges.

The staff were very friendly, which was a big plus, and the apartment layout and amount of space worked perfectly for five adults over four days. It's adequate, but a bit run down: the sink wouldn't drain, the dishwasher was missing its front panel, and the cabinets were peeling. The fold-out sofa bed was very basic and felt like a prison mattress. Service is what really brought the rating down. The apartments are serviced once a week for stays of a week or more, so we had to buy things like toilet paper after the initial supply ran out. Getting to the Tube also took a bit of effort, with every station about a 10-minute walk away.

The heating was very good, and we could set the room to a temperature everyone found comfortable. But the service was limited: they don't come in until you've been there six days, so we washed our own towels and bought toilet paper and shower soap. They provided only two tablets for washing dishes or using the machine, and even after ringing three times about toilet paper, we had to get our own. We arrived late, and our group of five had just one set of keys. We had to wait a day before we could follow our plans because we couldn't split up. The sofa bed was uncomfortable, and you could feel every spring. When we complained, they gave us a second duvet to sleep on.