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How to Work Lastminute.com’s Top Secret Hotels

Want to boost your odds with Lastminute.com Top Secret Hotels deals? Bestselling author and style blogger Maggie Alderson has classified information.

Finding somewhere reasonably priced and decent to stay in central London is on a par with locating the Holy Grail, hens’ teeth etc, so  Lastminute.com’s ‘Top Secret Hotel’ offers seem like the answer. You get a greatly reduced rate – but the catch is you don’t find out which hotel it is until after you have paid.

The sell on the website is as follows: ‘Shhh, these rates are so low that our hotel partners don’t want to put their names to them. So we can bring you these exclusive deals, we don’t reveal the name of the hotel until you’ve booked.’

It does give you the hotel’s star rating, facilities and quite a specific location, but the moment you click the ‘buy’ button remains a bit of a nail biter.

I confess the set-up appeals equally to the gambler and the bargain lover in me, but it comes with some risk. I have had some very happy experiences such as being upgraded on arrival (the Millennium, Berkeley Square), but I’ve also been treated rudely by check in staff, and been given a room so small and horrid it defied belief (let’s just say it was somewhere in Piccadilly).

My last experience, at the fabulous Inter Continental right on Hyde Park Corner, was to be told there were only rooms available on the smoking floor – and I heard another couple getting the same line. It was a bit stinky, but the room was so amazing with views right over Hyde Park, and such good value with a fabulous breakfast, I would definitely stay there again.

But now there is a thread on a website which can take all the risky guess work out of it. Money Saving Expert has introduced a forum where people post which hotels they ended up from the Last Minute descriptions and what they were like.

Finding an affordable hotel room in central London just got a whole lot easier.

 

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uggboy/ / CC BY 2.0

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