easyHotel London Croydon

Although the 103 hotel rooms are compact, rooms at the Croydon easyHotel are more spacious than some other hotels in the easyHotel chain. Rooms are big enough for a double bed and a small en-suite bathroom. However, there’s no desk and no wardrobe (just a couple of coat hangers stuck to the wall). This hotel does not have televisions in the rooms, nor does it have tea and coffee making facilities but all rooms are air-conditioned.

There are a handful of wheelchair-accessible rooms and these are larger than the standard rooms.

It is a clean hotel that has a bright modern decor, although not everyone is a fan of the bright easyJet orange.

The hotel is owned by easyJet and it is run on much the same lines as a budget airline. Rooms are priced according to the same yield management pricing strategy where rooms are very cheap if you book well in advance (as low as £18 per night) but more expensive (around £60) if you leave things to the last minute. Also like budget airlines, all those little extras that would normally be free at other hotels come at an additional charge. Do you need wireless internet access? That’s an extra £5 per day. Want to check out late? That will cost you ten quid. It will also cost you a tenner if you want your room cleaned.

Although the more centrally-located easyHotels have cheap beds closer to the centre of town, you’re more likely to find cheap rooms available at the Croydon easyHotel.

The hotel is in a brutalist grey concrete building in Croydon, which is a large commercial centre in suburban south London. While local councillors like to compare Croydon with Manhattan, it’s not quite the big apple and more a depressing concrete jungle of office buildings for businesses that don’t like the idea of paying central London rents. However, the area is not without its charm and Boxpark, a hipster foodcourt built with shipping containers has opened a branch in Croydon which means that there is a good choice of places to eat and drink nearby.

The main attraction of the Croydon location, however, is the easy access to excellent transport connections, which can get you into central London in just over 15 minutes. Although Croydon is located way out in zone five, there are trains into central London every few minutes and many of these run express, taking only 16 or 17 minutes to go to London Bridge or Victoria stations (there are also direct trains to St Pancras station but these take longer). In the other direction, there are direct trains to Brighton (less than one hour away with five trains per hour) and Gatwick Airport (only 15 minutes away with very frequent services). East Croydon railway station is only a two-minute walk from the hotel and Boxpark is only a couple of minutes’ walk farther.

It is a cheap place to stay and its location midway between central London and Gatwick Airport is more convenient that you would expect. However, if you’re after something more centrally-located it can be worth checking the easyHotels in South Kensington, Paddington and Victoria before booking this one.