London - July 2025

Is your friend working on a particular budget? Prices looks fairly close to normal that period, maybe just a little higher, and my concern is if they stay outside of London, any saving on accomodation may be wiped out by the cost of trains.

If on a very tight budget, consider Premier Inns.

I would normally book about 3 months out for London.

I doubt Oasis will be impacting prices as there are events of that size every day. Premier Inn is a good call. Maybe look a little further out such as the one on Ealing Broadway which is handy for tube and Elizabeth Line.

Yes prices look very average to me. It will be around £300 a night for a 4 star hotel in central London, with centrally located Premier Inns around the £200 mark. For a weekend outside say January this is very normal.

Here's another rec for Premier Inns. They have family rooms that will fit (probably tightly but still) up to 2 adults and 2 children (up to age 16), with pretty reasonable costs. I stayed at the Premier Inn County Hall near South Bank earlier this year and was very pleased with it. The beds are always very comfortable, it's clean and consistently good. There are plenty of restaurants and cafes in the area as well. https://www.premierinn.com/gb/en/hotels/england/greater-london/london/london-county-hall.html

The County Hall location is also very close to Waterloo station, which is the station they would probably use for the SW Railway train to Portsmouth. There is also the Premier Inn Waterloo near that same location, which gives them another option. And it's close to many of the sites. You can walk over the Westminster Bridge to Westminster Abbey in under 10 minutes.

My suggestion was also the Premier Inn County Hall. Close to Waterloo and central for all the tourist sites. I stayed there this past summer and think its an excellent choice for first time visitor on a budget. However, she said two rooms was outside their budget. I will keep thinking of alternatives and see if they can reduce days in London to 1-2 nights.

If the County Hall PI is out of budget just have a look at other sites on their website. It’s easy to check rates at all PIs in London. Others won’t be as convenient for your friends’ plans but there are still plenty of good locations usually bit cheaper.

Edit:- I now see the relevant dates. The PI County Hall is showing at £535 but there is one south of Tower Hill at £399. This assumes the family can get into one PI room. If they need 2 rooms it will obviously cost more but the differential should still be there.

Vancouver Studios has a 1 bedroom apartment for 200GBP per night and says maximum occupancy is 4 people. It has one king bed and one sofa bed. They also have a quad studio but that's much more expensive (1000GBP for 3 nights). These are all in the Bayswater area.

The problem is they are staying on a Friday and Saturday night on the first weekend of the Summer school holidays.

The PI at Waterloo is £518, that at Tower Bridge (just on the south side of the Bridge) is £399, so £120 cheaper. The first night is only £109, Friday night £125, Saturday night £165 to illustrate the point.

Wimbledon PI is £277- very easy to commute into London by train or tube, in the London fare zones, for Portsmouth train to Woking, change there or direct district line tube back to Victoria for National Express direct to the Ferryport/Cruise Port.
The bus is £15 each, the 1000 arrives at the Port at 12 noon, ideal time for check in.

Go by train and you need a taxi or to walk round, or a citybus to outside the port entrance.

PI's at Heathrow are as low as £213 for the 3 nights

Croydon Town Centre is on for £248, very easy access to London, direct train to Portsmouth, every hour, Advance Fares on a Sunday morning from East Croydon to Portsmouth are £7 each. The 0853 arrives at 1051, saunter round to the port. The other way into London East Croydon is in Zone 6.

Perhaps deal with prices by spending one of those nights in Portsmouth at a less expensive hotel. The Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is well worth the time.

I'd advise everyone to figure out a way to leverage a credit card to get you hotel status; my Amex makes me Hilton Gold and I believe Chase can do similar, I would highly recommend the Hilton Curio Lost Property hotel directly across from St Pauls. In 30 seconds you can be in the middle of the Millennium Bridge staring up and down river. There was a property nearby called the Leonardo which might be worth investigating.

But ultimately all hotel prices have risen all over the world, and London was never cheap to begin with.

Thank you Phred

That was my exact conversation with them yesterday. They are looking into using points to use a Hilton.

Thank you Is31c

Thank you for taking the taking the time to check out the prices. Yes, I told them the dates are the worse because of the school summer holidays, concert in town etc, I generally tell my friends to avoid the later part of July for this reason, but the cruise was booked a long time ago.