London

Go back just ten years. London was “top of the pops” for visiting. London hotels were bursting at the seams with American tourists staying a week or more before moving on to Paris for another week. The hotels loved them because they spent a small fortune buying whisky in the hotel bar at inflated prices and made lots of overseas telephone calls from their room. Consequently, the hotel scene mushroomed.
Its a very different story now. The slide effectively started as we all know with 911, then we had foot and mouth, then mad cow disease, then terrorist attacks in London and several financial hiccups to boot!
We have checked and just before 911 we were selling 4 star hotels at 99 pounds double occupancy, this inflated to an average of over 150 pounds over the following years and now would you believe, you can book a 4 star hotel for 99 pounds!
It has long been claimed by overseas tourists that London was too expensive and I would agree with that. Its ok offering a 4 star at 150 to 200 pounds if its value for money, however some “so called” 3 and 4 star hotels rocked the boat and gave London a bad reputation which has stuck.
There is no regulatory organisation which officially classifies hotels standards therefore allowing London hotels to self classify. This means that you can have a perfectly nice 3 star hotel that installs flat screen televisions then gets in a professional photographer, contracts a great looking website and instantly upgrades itself to a 4 star. This is great for sales but bad from a satisfaction factor when the client arrives and sees his room.
Another inflationary factor was the popular practice of overseas investors buying a London hotel simply to hold for a few years and cash in the the property value increase. They did not want to invest in the hotel fixtures and fittings as that would reduce the bottom line profit so the quality declined but the room price increased based on historical reputaion and a swish website.
Now with the global downturn, London hotels which blossomed up all over the place are suffering. Joe public is watching the pennies and luxury items like a weekend in London at the theatre or shopping have been cut from the budget.
Hotels which are usually very busy at this time of the year (boosted by European Chrismas shoppers) are unusually quiet. Yes the last two or three saturday nights have been a bonanza but a hotel is open 7 days a week not just Saturday nights. Never the less we saw one “4 star” in Paddington selling last saturday at a greedy 288 pounds whilst Monday to Friday was 69 pounds. There is no doubt that some actually paid 288 pounds in order to get a room but are those people going to give that hotel a great review when what they got was a run of the mill fairly basis room.
So, where do we go from here?
In 2010, some hotels will go down, that is for sure. Others backed by profits made several years ago will continue to survive on less staff and less guest luxuries. The big chains with multiple 4 stars will downgrade prices to 3 star hotel rates. This will deprive the bread and butter backbone 3 star hotels of bookings. They will consequently cut their prices too.
A result for the consumer? Short term yes but mid term no because these hotels will stop refurbishing and over the next two years will also become “tired”. The property investors will have to hold the property because its lost value and they will also not refurbish.
But hey whats the problem, the Olympics is in 2 years and hotel prices will treble or more.
All in all the London hotel industry needs a shake up and a strong regulatory body to govern it.
The popularity of London as a destination is falling with overseas visitors and can not survive without the 4 star corporate stays and just the one night saturday night tourist.
London hotels became greedy, now they will pay the piper.
The prices quoted were provided by London-hotels.co.uk