Review of Holiday Inn London-Shepperton, an IHG Hotel 4*

Starting with check in, when I was given the card reader it showed an amount greater than what my booking had stated and once I queried this I was told that there’s a £25 credit / tab system and if I don’t use it it will be refunded — it would have been better customer service for the person checking me in to tell me this before trying to charge my card. Going to the rooms which have been newly refurbished — our room the TV remote didn't work (which after so many other aspects of the stay being stressful we never reported as it wasn't worth the trouble), and the other room the safe broke and required the manager to manually unlock the safe which we were then unable to use safely for the rest of the stay. Moving on to lunch, we thought we would try the bar but the staff at the bar were slow to serve, upset my mum by serving the person behind her before serving her, and then once food arrived it was sub satisfactory — the chips were hardly cooked and greasy, and the sandwiches I am told were also not of a good standard for the money that we were charged. I do believe my parents were refunded 50% of the food bill for the lunch but by this point I had already left in tears over just how awful my birthday weekend was turning out. Finally, after a terrible day on the Saturday we went down for breakfast at 9am on Sunday morning only finding 2, possibly 3 members of staff on duty — we had to ask a table to be cleared as there wasn’t any, I could find just 1 small plate for toast, there were no ceramic mugs available which were clean so staff were bringing out paper takeaway cups to put by the machine and the food itself was luke warm. When it came to checking out I have never been so relieved to be leaving a hotel. No matter how much money is spent on renovations, if there is chronic understaffing and the staff that were working lacked training, it is not worth staying again. My birthday weekend was a complete disaster and I am left disappointed and out of pocket.