Travel fun: The Deluxe London Loft Apartment that moved

 Dear Booking.com, I couldn't leave this review (for reasons below), but I want to warn others about "London Deluxe Loft Apartment"

We got relocated  - new room was quite grotty

We booked the Deluxe London Loft Apartment shown in this listing, and we paid this price (£75) but then I got a phone call the day before the booking from Shabz, the owner and, for reasons I can’t remember, we were relocated to a different flat, in Ilford.

The new flat was by a roundabout of the busy main road and had very loud traffic noise all night. It was also quite smelly, with what seemed like old cigarette smoke covered in cleaning products. (We didn’t discover till the second night of our stay that the window opened, which helped.)

The flat was converted from one bedroom, with a tiny kitchen and toilet with shower both squeezed into the end. So squeezed in, in fact, that the dividing wall went down the window, so the window was partly in the kitchen and partly in the toilet. The toilet had no curtains so, when one sat down, one was visible from the street. (We improvised a blind made of kitchen roll and blu tac).

The sofa was broken so it sagged into the middle. The glass topped table was also broken, with its leg held together with brown packing tape.

The pillows were lumpy, but possibly worst of all, the beds had plastic under-sheeting, as one would put on the bed of an incontinent child. 

The rigmarole of getting the key was over-complicated and necessitated me ringing Shabz when we arrived outside the house (at 8.30pm) and being given the code for the box with the keys in. He wouldn’t give it to me any earlier for security reasons.

So, in short, if Shabz rings you up and offers to relocate you to a different apartment, I would recommend not moving to the flat at 29 Royston Parade, Ilford. 

Quite what the Deluxe Loft Apartment we originally booked was like, I can’t say. It may be great.

PS: Shabz also asked for a £100 deposit. Before he would give this back, he asked me to click the setting on the booking.com website stating that I hadn’t stayed at that apartment. I subsequently discovered this prevented me from leaving a review.