We took our two young boys and our grown niece to London during mid June 2007 and stayed at the 13 Half Moon Street Apartments in London Mayfair for 10 nights. This is a three bedroom serviced apartment that is affiliated with the Flemings Mayfair Hotel right next door. We were in the Sanford suite, aka room 602. We paid more than 500GBP per night and it was not worth one penny of it.

First of all, every floor board creaked in the apartment so badly that you knew exactly where each family member was in the two-storey apartment. That also goes for being awoken everytime our niece went to the bathroom in the middle of the night or when our upstairs neighbour walked about in his flat!

But that is just the beginning of it. Our washing machine was broken and water kept leaking out of it., this was eventually replaced. Three of the range on our stove did not light up because it would not
spark and we were given a gas gun and told to spark it manually. None of the TVs in our three bedrooms worked. The TV in the living room eventually broke down as well. The telephone lines failed and the internet also crashed. We were told that these were all because of faulty lines caused by the flood in other parts of UK, but I highly doubted it as people living acorss from us were getting crystal clear TV reception! On top of all this, there was no cold water in the faucets of our bathroom upstairs, not a drop of cold water in the bathtub or in the sink. This was fixed and a tiny stream
of cold water could flow out. Then the dining table felt like it was going to collaspe at any minute wobbling left and right everytime we had dinner. So we took turns to cut our meal to avoid the table from totally collasping on us. Being on the first floor right of Half Moon Street, you were awoken every morning bright and VERY early by delivery trucks and garbage collectors! I never slept past 7am and this was supposed to be a holiday!

Now, to top it all off, the ultimate insult is yet to come. I went to
the Flemings Mayfair hotel (that managed these apartments) to complain about all these defects asking for them to be fixed in one go so we could get a semi-normal life. I was subsequently contacted by the Guest Relations Manager who bluntly asked me to "come down and negotiate what compensation I wanted." It made me feel like I filed the complaint because I wanted a few dollars in return. It was the ultimate insult and it was done in bad taste. I refused the offer telling the lady that not everything can be measured in monetary terms! For the rest of our stay we were still left with a tiny stream of cold water running out of our facets, none of the TVs were fixed and we still took turns to cut our food! Yet iIn the end, we paid every penny on the bill, for dignity sake.

13 Half Moon Street apartments advertised itself to be a top grade serivce apartment. Nothing can be further from the turth. The worst part was really the insensitive manner in which our compliant was handled.

Please, if you need a serviced apartment in London, do not choose 13 Half Moon Street Apartments.

Christine Wong