Thistle London Heathrow Terminal 5

Great location and restaurant.

Excellent service from receptionist Sochiel.

Staff were very helpful and very polite..thanks

Although the room and the bed were small, it was clean. Staff were friendly and helpful, and the breakfast was pretty good. Unfortunately, one must climbed a full flight of stairs, and then walk a ways to reach the restaurant. The view was nice for watching airplanes take off. Riding in a driverless POD was a unique and fun experience. But, it required a quite long walk across a few bumpy parking lots to get to the hotel, and still longer to the reception. The layout is very odd and each building is very long. We found using the local bus was much better for us as it was not nearly as far to walk, and much cheaper! We rode it to Terminal 5 and caught the train into London. Upon our return, it was difficult to discern where to catch a bus back. We waited over an hour and the bus we caught was more than double in price. As far as getting to Terminal 3 to fly out of Heathrow, I do not recommend the bus or the POD. Take a taxi and save yourself a lot of walking, because once inside 3, it is still very far to the gates.

When we checked in our room was not ready, but the desk person asked if we would mind a free upgrade to a king size bed. That took quite a while, but finally we were issued our key card and instructions to go to C6 (or another number). It seemed a little odd for a room to have a "C" attached to the number, but oh well. Once we were in the elevator it became clear that C indicated "CELLAR"! I seriously doubt if the room met any fire codes because there was no legal egress. The cellar window was about even with my face, and even if we could have reached it for escaping a fire, the handle was completely broken off. This was not a "budget" room and came with a total price of $216 for one night. I requested an iron and ironing board, which were delivered to our room. The iron quit working after about 10 minutes, and it took almost an hour to get a replacement. The final straw occurred when we went to check out. The elevator would not come to our floor. We could hear it in the shaft and even suspected it did come to the cellar, but would not open! We tried for 16 minutes. There was no way we could haul our luggage up the stairs so my husband went in search of someone to help. A male employee came around the corner and I called out to him for assistance with the luggage. Instead he stood beside me pushing the button for several more minutes! Suddenly the doors opened. Not magic fingers. It turned out that a rug inside the elevator was blocking the sensor and stopping the doors.