Dear Sir ;

We are more than happy to help with luggage and we often do so without asking. Elderly couples and solo female travellers are always asked to leave their luggage and we will carry it for them ; it is our policy . Young men we hope will be able to manage this themselves : but if you ask we can do this no questions . I think thats fair enough ??

We provide an ironing room so you can iron your shirts in our desiganted room; this gives all of us piece of mind that this is done in a controlled environment. We do not allow ironging in the rooms as someone could fall asleep with the iron left on . Therfor we do this for our guests safety.

We offer Wifi for free and also wired LAN access. There are ports in the room so you can connect direct to the internet if the Wifi is not fast enough. We also provide ethernet cables if you do not have one

The fire alarm went off at 130 am . This was because a particular guest had swithched off their extractor fan and ran a hot shower and left the bathroom door open and proceeded to fall alseep ! From my experience of running a hotel chain for 10 years it is normally something like this. We could have evacuated the entire building and left everyone across the street for 45 minutes in the cold whilst we waited for the fire brigade to show up only to find a sleeping and slightly innebriated man with his shower on ! This would have been a complete and senseless waste of everyones valuable sleep and time not to mention a waste of resources for the over worked emergency services . From our fire panel we can pin point the exact room the problem is coming from . All in all we dealt with this a smoothly as possible. Apologies for any inconveneince but feel safe in the knowledge that our Fire Alarm System works and we are here 24 hrs a day.

We have signs and information on all our websites informing guests of our temporary breakfast room arrangements whilst we are building a brand new consevatory from which we will serve breakfast. We ask you to bear with us whilst we make the improvements . We expect to open our new dining room in July 2012.

Your comments on " witty " advice for other travellers are unsubstantiated

Couples : You came alone ( I wonder why ? )

Family : We clearly dont put familes in our single rooms !!! ( We have family rooms for this which have two large double beds and a much larger room )

Solo : We have many regular customers who stay with us every week

All in all sir ; there are always areas where we can improve our service and hotel. We are constantly making uprades and improvents to our hotel and we are willing to learn from our customer feedback; that is why we leave tripadvisor literature in our rooms asking customers to review us . We are not afraid of our reviews and we actively learn from them .

Furthermore : You also told the duty manager that if you did not a 1 night refund from the hotel for your stay you would leave a bad review on tripadvisor ... Refer to an article in the Evening Standard and in the Guardian saying some customers are abusing the tripadvisor system by blackmailing hotels into refunding their accomodation so they wont leave bad reviews ! .... As I said previously we are not afraid of our reviews and know that most savvy custmoers will look at a variery of reviews before they make their minds up.

Many thanks for your review and time

Patrick
Manager