Comfort Inn Kings Cross London hotel is located a block from King’s Cross and St Pancras railway stations, about five minutes walk. The hotel offers 63 rooms in a neighborhood residential setting, although it appears about half the building spaces for several streets in the area are actually small hotels.
A Saturday night reward stay in February cost 8,000 Choice Privileges points. I paid $41 for 8,000 points when I purchased a large batch of 267,000 points in May 2019 during U.S. Travel Association’s Daily Getaways and Kids First Auctions.
I didn’t expect much from a Choice Hotel in London after having stayed in a couple of other Choice Hotels properties around Victoria Station on previous trips to London. The Storm Dennis weather forecast for the day of our arrival at London Heathrow and lasting through the weekend meant I wanted to be nearby Comfort Inn & Suites St Pancras-Kings Cross, where we had five nights booked. In the Sunday rainstorm we only had to walk down the street about 150 meters to change hotels after our night at Comfort Inn Kings Cross.
The lobby was a minimal space not really conducive to hanging out. Drinks for sale in lobby are a convenience, but there are plenty of markets with a Co-op Food store around the corner on Grays Inn Road for basic food items at reasonable prices. Sainsbury’s Local and Tesco Metro, a full service market are about five minutes walk across Euston Road.
Our assigned room at #120 was a key locked room. Having been so long since I used an actual key for a hotel room, I left the key in the door lock for the first 30 minutes after arrival, only noticing it when we left the room to go pubbing. I kind of worried about losing the key and stored it away in a coat pocket I rarely use while we were out. Then the following morning I forgot to lock the door when I went to breakfast and Kelley was still in bed sleeping. Other rooms in the hallway near #120 had key card locks.
Warning for the uninitiated hotel guest staying in Great Britain. Brits have different bed sizes, aka small-ass beds compared to their similarly named US bed size. King, Queen and Double beds in UK sizes are narrower than their corresponding U.S-labeled bed sizes. Unless the bed is labeled a King Bed, and even then it might be much smaller than anticipated, the safe bet is two single beds. This sentiment was reconfirmed when we spent the next five nights sleeping fitfully cramped in a Double Bed at Comfort Inn & Suites St Pancras-Kings Cross. Kelley called that Double Bed booking in London my biggest travel fuck-up in a long time.
My primary complaint about the room was the window that I could not close. Generally I like an open window in a hotel room, however, we were on the first floor. Try as I might, I was unable to budge the hinges on the window to close it before we left for dinner at Lucas Arms pub on Grays Inn Road. Since the room did not face the open road, I did not stress over the situation. Of course I could have gone to the desk for assistance, but we opted for good fortune during our absence. The window stayed open all night as the rain fell and the wind blew during Storm Dennis.
The window faced an unsightly interior space of the hotel.
The room view was not really much of a concern as we basically used the room for one night’s passed out sleep after a night of pub crawling. We left the hotel by 11am without hanging around inside looking out the room window. The room location would have been a drag for a longer hotel stay considering the bad weather for most of the week kept us in our next hotel room a bit more than we planned.
Breakfast Included
The breakfast room downstairs was too small for the number of hotel guests. Breakfast had no hot food items. There were boxes of cereal, some pieces of fruit, a couple kinds of pastries, bread and toaster, containers of yogurt in a refrigerator and some deli meat and sliced cheese. Coffee and tea. Basic, but certainly far more substantive fare than at Comfort Inn & Suites St Pancras-Kings Cross, where only coffee, tea, orange juice, toast and dry cereal were offered for the five days we were there.
Hotel Location
The location of Comfort Inn Kings Cross is its top feature in my opinion. I liked the neighborhoods around the hotel. The hotel is conveniently located for easy access to Kings Cross and St Pancras Rail Stations for long distance travel. Kings Cross/St Pancras Underground Station offers access to several Underground lines for city travel.
There are several good pubs in the Kings Cross/Bloomsbury area and multiple grocery stores within a few minutes walk. Camden Town is a 25 minute walk to the north and the Theater District a 25 minute walk to the south through Bloomsbury neighborhoods. British Library is a ten minutes walk for viewing items like the Magna Carta and Shakespeare’s First Folio and the impressive collection of the British Museum is only a 20 minutes walk. The Wellcome Collection is a unique museum on Euston Road and the Foundling Museum is an interesting bit of history for the development of the area.
Given a 110 GBP/$142 lowest room rate for the date of our stay, the option to book Comfort Inn Kings Cross for 8,000 Choice Privileges points was a welcome money saver choice for a hotel night. Members can buy 8,000 points for $60 through the Cash & Points booking option ($7.50 to buy 1,000 points). The fact that the room only cost me $41 made it the kind of deal that makes London affordable by leaving us more money for the kind of pub crawling we achieved during our time in the city when not walking around and visiting London’s extensive collection of free museums.
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