My Review of Le Meridien Piccadilly, London
Le Meridien is a legacy brand brought over to Marriott Bonvoy from the SPG programme. I’ve stayed at two Le Merdiens in the past (Marrakesh and Munich) and neither experience was great.
I’m going to give the London one – Le Meridien Piccadilly a try this time, partly because it is the last chance remaining – the hotel is leaving the Marriott group at the end of November.
Its location at the very centre of London is excellent. You could walk to so many major attractions from this point, and the tube can bring you non-stop to many spots, including Heathrow airport.
I was upgraded to a Junior Suite on the 7th floor, from a standard room.
Although not having a separate living room, it comes with a study, and the bedroom is huge. I think “junior” is really an understatement.
The bathroom is likewise fairly big, with both a shower and a tub. Although aged, the shower has great water pressure and it’s got multiple little shower heads from different angles that makes sure you are cleaned very well…
Its prime location doesn’t only come with benefits though – windows are not facing the main street but there are still notable noises.
The hotel is very old and I don’t know when’s the last time refurbishment happened. One major issue is, although my room is not lacking in socket-outlets, most of them are of an obsolete design and incompatible with modern devices:
I could find only two usable ones, both of them in the study.
Breakfast is served in the restaurant. I really like its design, especially the glass ceiling / window which allows lots of natural light pouring in.
It’s a Saturday, and I was shocked by the fact that I was the only guest throughout my entire meal. You could order a set of Full English, Fitness or Continental breakfast, and there are other items that are payable.
The executive lounge is still closed, which is the case for many hotels in the UK and Europe. To my surprise, this hotel has decided to offer proper compensation for it: free soft drinks are provided to lounge guests all day, and select items from the menu are free from 5pm to 7pm – this includes starters, burgers, sandwiches and pizza. I guess it must be much better than the usual lounge offerings!
It is by far the best Le Meridien I’ve ever stayed, and it’s a shame to see it leave Marriott. I was told by the front desk that the hotel is joining Kew Green – however I found that it’s just a management team, not a franchise, but it’s not joining any major brand that’s for sure.
Marriott has extended its two promotions
The current Marriott’s global promotion, where you earn 2,500 points for each paid stay, has just been extended from 18 October to 10 November. So in theory you could earn 57,500 more points!
There’s an additional 5,000 points after the third stay. However no one has got it yet, so presumably it will be deposited when the promotion is over. If you haven’t registered yet, the link is here.
Besides this, there’s another amazing Marriott offer for some UK Amex Platinum cardholders – Spend £400, Get £400 back at select Marriott hotels in the UK and Europe.
The UK Hotel list is:
- JW Marriott Grosvenor House London
- The London EDITION
- Bvlgari Hotel, London
- W London – Leicester Square
- The Park Tower Knightsbridge, a Luxury Collection Hotel, London
- The Wellesley Knightsbridge, a Luxury Collection Hotel, London
- The Westbury Mayfair, a Luxury Collection Hotel, London
- The Langley, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Buckinghamshire
- Trump Turnberry, a Luxury Collection Resort, Scotland
The deadline was set to 23 November at the beginning, which was very short as you’d have only a bit more than a month to use it. It’s been extended to 19 December now, which is good. However I’m not sure how relaxed travel restrictions will be in two month’s time.
InterContinental the George has just become “All Club”
There were two Principal Hotels in Edinburgh. After joining IHG, one of them became a Kimpton (which I reviewed here), and the other converted into InterContinental the George.
The hotel suffered massively from Covid, and has only re-opened very recently. There is a very interesting development though – the hotel has become “All Club” now, which means all hotel guests enjoy the Club InterContinental benefits.
Searching on ihg.com, you can see that even the basic room type: Superior Room comes with Club InterContinental access.
And what does Club InterContinental include? As suggested on their website:
- Complimentary welcome drink on arrival
- Sumptuous Breakfast
- All day refreshments
- Evening drinks and canapés
- Two complimentary items for pressing (per stay)
- Complimentary local telephone calls
- Complimentary WIFI
This is pretty much what you get when staying at an InterContinental hotel with club lounge benefits.
Prior to the George, the only “All Club” InterContinental hotel is the Maldives Maamunaga Resort. I think it’s more natural for a resort in Maldives to offer an inclusive package for all guests, and quite surprised that a city hotel has followed suit.
On the other hand though, it’s good to see that luxury hotels are providing more “freebies” to their guests, instead of making everything payable.
It’s not only good news though. The hotel has decided to completely shut its award night availability by marking all rooms as club, i.e. non-standard. It makes no sense, since you can certainly redeem points at the InterContinental Maldives Maamunaga Resort and I hope the hotel or IHG can rectify it soon.
However, it appears that you can use your Ambassador weekend night certificate here, which isn’t a bad option.
Hilton points have just become much more valuable – but only in the US
Since the introduction of dynamic award pricing, Hilton’s Honors programme has become much less interesting, or at least to some of us. With the removal of publicised award chart, Hilton has devalued its awards quietly a few times since, and it is more and more difficult to get outsized value when spending points.
A Hilton’s representative has just posted a thread on Flyertalk, talking about lowering down the award pricing at many US hotels. At the first glance, I almost discarded it as a useless piece of propaganda – given its dynamic nature, of course the award price will drop as the cash price has crashed in the country.
However, after I spent some time digging around, there are genuinely some great news here!
[Better Award Exchange Rate]
Hilton’s dynamic award pricing works out as follows: given a hotel’s best flexible rate (BFR), an award night costs roughly 10,000 points for every $50 charged. The rate is slightly different per region and hotel, but it’s largely the same globally.
Surely there’s also a cap that applies to each hotel, which takes effect when the cash rate is very high, but let’s not talk about it here.
The exchange rate seems to have become a lot more attractive in some US cities. Take Orlando for example, for a Saturday night in October you could easily get $60 of value out of 10,000 points.
You may think the difference is not huge and could just be an acceptable error. However, if you move the date to March next year, some hotels are priced at almost $100 per 10,000 points!
[More Standard Awards]
Although points almost have a fixed value now, Hilton didn’t go fully revenue-based like Accor. Usually you can only redeem points for standard rooms (Standard Award), and for better rooms the awards (Premium Award) are priced much worse.
It looks like many US hotels are very flexible with the definition of “standard rooms” now. Again in Florida, Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort has opened up their Junior Suite for redemption:
Although to the fair its fare difference to the basic room type is small. (Again, you are getting $87 per 10,000 points which is amazing)
In Seattle, if you have a look at the Charter Hotel, the four lowest room types are priced differently both in cash and in points.
However, if you click through, all four room types are Standard Awards. Not only does it mean it offers a better exchange rate, but also the “5th night free” benefit applies in this case for Hilton Silver members and above.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find anything similar in Europe. I guess US is being hit by the pandemic very hard at the moment so Hilton is trying to experiment something new here. Hopefully, at some point it gets rolled out to the rest of the world.
Amazon Prime Day: £10 top-up bonus, 6-month free Music Unlimited
This year’s Amazon Prime Day is here and there are currently a few decent offers out there. Note that you must be a Prime member to participate, and you can sign up to a free one-month trial here.
Promo 1: Top up £100 or more, get £10 bonus credit for free. Offer page is here. Since there’s no restriction on account credit and it doesn’t expire, there’s no reason not to participate.
Promo 2: Buy an Echo Dot for £18.99, and get a six-month Amazon Music Unlimited free trial. Offer page is here. Free trials are usually just for three months, so this deal is not to be missed. Unfortunately it’s targeted at new Amazon Music users only.
Promo 3: Up to 50% off Amazon Devices. Although I’m not convinced if most of the so-called “Prime Day Deals” are genuine, the Amazon Devices sale definitely is.
Offers end midnight 14 October.
Radisson hotels award night rebate offer – up to 58% savings!
Radisson Rewards just started a new Award Night Rebate offer to encourage members to make bookings, and combined with a couple of other existing promotions it can turn out to be very interesting.
To participate, you must first sign up here.
- Book by October 25
- Stay by December 20
- You will earn 25% rebate on all your award night bookings (excluding Cat 1 hotels)
- Rebate will be deposited to your account within 10 business days after your stay
Remember the two other offers that are running:
- Until October 25, you can buy Radisson points for 0.35 cents
- Until December 31, each Radisson stay earns a bonus of 5,000 points
All things considered, here is what a one-night award stay costs you:
| Category | Full Price | Discounted Price | Cost |
| 1 | 9000 | 4000 | $17.5 |
| 2 | 15000 | 6250 | $21.5 |
| 3 | 28000 | 16000 | $56 |
| 4 | 38000 | 23500 | $82.3 |
| 5 | 44000 | 28000 | $98 |
| 6 | 50000 | 32500 | $113.8 |
| 7 | 70000 | 47500 | $166.3 |
This is an exceptional deal at lower-end hotels, but unfortunately there aren’t many of them in the UK or Europe. At the very top end, The May Fair hotel in London is still selling for £200+ a night, and redeeming points seems to be a decent bargain.
The offer also applies to Premium Room Award (+50% points) and Family Room Award (25%+).
Radisson Hotels 25% off EMEA sale
Radisson hotels has just launched a new promotion in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
You can access the offer page here.
- Book by October 21
- Stay by February 28, 2021
- Discount is 10% – 25% at Radisson Edwardian hotels, for all other brands it seems to be a flat 25%
- Reservations are cancellable 24 hours prior to arrival
I checked some UK hotels:
- Park Plaza Westminster Bridge London £111
- The May Fair, A Radisson Collection Hotel £213
- Park Plaza London Park Royal £64
- The Edwardian Manchester, A Radisson Collection Hotel £123
- Park Plaza Cardiff £86
The rate is not very impressive – at the same discount (25%) Marriott chooses to throw in breakfast as well. If you find anything that suits your plan though, don’t forget to register to the current Radisson promotion to earn 5000 bonus points per stay.
You can now book (and redeem!) Mr & Mrs Smith hotels on IHG
IHG announced their strategic partnership with Mr & Mrs Smith hotels a couple of years ago – it’s similar to the tie between Hyatt and SLH, as in IHG doesn’t buy any part of the latter, so the integration is limited.
The partnership went totally quiet afterwards though, and the only evidence of its existence is a bunch of Mr & Mrs Smith hotels that have shown up on IHG’s website, although none of them were bookable!
Things are finally rolling again. A handful of hotels are now active with IHG, bookable using either cash or points. The number of hotels is expected to reach 100 by the end of October, and all 400+ IHG-participating hotels from Mr & Mrs Smith will be phased out by the end of November.
Here are some of the available hotels (thanks to Flyertalk):
- The Crown Hotel, Amersham, UK £105 / 22,500 points
- AdAstra, Florence, Italy £118 / 25,000 points
- Berns Hotels, Stockholm, Sweden £158 / 35,000
You are getting around 0.45p per point, which is not bad considering you can buy IHG point for 0.5 cent during their 100% bonus sale. It’s unlikely to get any better though, since IHG’s deal with Mr & Mrs Smith is quite different to its own brands, so it probably needs to pay the hotels the same level of compensation (your payment minus the commission) whether you are paying cash or points.
The catch is, there is a 30-day cancellation window for redemptions at Mr & Mrs Smith hotels. This is somewhat understandable, again due to how the redemption actually works so IHG is trying to protect itself here, but it makes using points on Mr & Mrs Hotels much less attractive.
A recap on your benefits booking Mr & Mrs Hotels via IHG:
- You earn regular night credit and points (10 points / $1)
- Elite members get a bonus on their earning too
- IHG Rewards Club benefits don’t apply, but Ambassadors can enjoy the GoldSmith treatment during their stay: complimentary room upgrade and welcome amenity