London is expensive and if, like us, you want to spend your cash on the incedible experiences the city has to offer, rather than on a place to sleep, you’ll be looking for a great deal on budget hotels, apartments or other family accommodation.
We have used all of the properties in this post, we usually pick accommodation based on the following criteria:
Really, nothing else matters to us in London.
isn’t massively important to us, so long as you are near a train or tube line in London you can get around easily, although the more central the hotel, the less your transport bill will be. ( Children under 11 usually travel free making the tube and buses a great deal for families.)
is a big issue. We need free, good wifi, in our room. We see many hotels and apartments in London with wifi only in public areas and some where wifi is available at an extra charge, usually around 5 pounds per day per device. That’s just not good enough in 2015 and we won’t touch those places.
can be a bonus, being able to feed the children easily in the mornings makes life easier. Tea and coffee making facilities are essential to me and it’s rare to find these absent in a room in London. Apartment hotels are surprisingly common and more surprisingly, cheap.
can be very handy. London is littered with small supermarkets and coffee shops, finding food is super easy and inexpensive, so we don’t worry about food provision too much.
often cut costs. Sometimes we use these hotels and have never had a problem with the facilities.
but so far they have always been more expensive than cheap hotels and apartments.
There are almost too many options these days, making the searching process very time consuming and frustrating. Many swear by AirBnb, but for us it has been pointless looking on this site. It is always more expensive for families, hidden charges stack up, with service fees and extra charges per person per night. Hotels.com prices seem low, but when you finalise your booking a whole stack of extra taxes and fees suddenly appear. We use Agoda and Booking.com, usually Agoda as their reward points stack up nicely to give you free nights in future.
The lowest we have ever paid is around £50, the most we have paid £120. Obviously the sky is the limit, the Savoy will set you back around £1500 per night. But the location is great! Prices fluctuate enormously, a hotel that is £50 one night could be £150 the next and it is very difficult to predict which hotel will be cheap on which days. Some hotels are cheaper on weekends, some are cheaper mid week. Public holidays, peak season and school holidays will obviously bump up prices. We find ourselves staying for 2 nights here, 2 nights there, because booking a solid stay in 1 hotel will often take you into their most expensive period. Use the bookng sites to show you prices for 2 nights, 3 nights, 4 nights, you’ll see how the prices change. Obviously, we’re not on holiday, we’re just using London as a base for a week or so when we’re hotel-hopping around the city. If you want to enjoy a vacation here fully, don’t penny pinch like this, it will kill your enjoyment and waste your valuable time. We’ve lived in London for many years, we’re not here to see the sights, nor to go to the theatre and enjoy great dining opportunities.
We hope these examples will give you an idea of what you’ll pay and what you’ll get. Don’t forget, this is for a family of four.
We’ve used the Staycity apartments near Heathrow many, many times now. The apartments are new, large, clean and well equipped. There is a Tesco Metro ( mini supermarket) downstairs and cheap pay-to-wash machines within the building. We’ve payed under £50 for one of their one bed apartments, but their prices skyrocket at other times. Around £90 seems fairly typical. This Staycity is right on an overland train line into London, so not great if you need to go into the city every day, there is no tube connection, but fine if you just need a base for a few days.
Breakfast at this budget friendly family sized hotel in Hackney.
I’ve posted before about Silk House Hotel ( click through to check price and availability), we thought this was the best deal in London. Their one child under 8 stays free deal worked extremely well for us for a while, giving us a room at just £48, unfortunately my younger child no longer qualifies. This one is on the tube network and you can read about Silk House in full in this post. A DIY cold breakfast was included at this hotel, an added bonus was the garden, the kids loved kicking a ball around here.
No room to stand up, but it does the job! Family apartment hotel in West Kensington, London
We used this converted West Kensington house twice, in two different apartments. The price is good and the location excellent, but the rooms are very small. Both featered a futon type bed on a mezzanine level, accessed by a very steep ladder. The sofa bed in the living area folds out to provide two more beds. A small private kitchen and tiny bathroom is a part of each appartment. We managed o get these at just under £60.
I honestly don’t know the price of this one, we were invited to stay as guests, but I’ll include it for you to make your own enquiries. This luxury apartment ( find a full post about it here) was beautiful, large, well equipped and well located. The apartment rental company, FG Property Management, has many more luxury apartments in various cities around the world.
Included breakfast at this family room hotel or B&B was an added bonus
More of a traditional British style B&B, Comfotel Grn ( click to view) is named as an hotel. Our room was OK, a reasonable size with comfortable beds and the bathroom was large and modern. The whole building was in the process of being refurbished while we were there. Breakfast was good, eggs, cereal, fruit, yogurt and sweet things, made to order in the kitchen/dining room by pleasant staff. The young man on the front desk was super helpful. Shepperds Bush is a great location, we were a short walk from Hammersmith’s excellent transport connections, there are plenty more hotels along this road. We paid around £70 to stay here.
We hope this gives you an idea of what to expect at the cheaper end of the market, we think we’re pretty good at finding great deals, we hope you enjoy your stay in our home city!
Let me know what you think, do you have any great ways of finding London deals on hotels and appartments?
