Rafayel on the Left Bank

The hotel has accommodation in 71 rooms set over four floors of a 17-storey building. All rooms are air-conditioned and have comfortable beds with Hypnos mattresses, a work desk, a flatscreen television, a minibar, tea and coffee making facilities and en suite bathrooms with walk-in showers and a bidet. Rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows and many of the rooms offer views of the River Thames.

Rooms are relatively spacious and are named after famous rivers, starting with the standard Mississippi rooms and moving up to the superior Yangtze rooms, the premium deluxe Thames rooms and the Amazon, Emperor and Nile suites. No, we don’t know of any Emperor River either.

The rooms look quite nice but other parts of the hotel are simply tacky in the sense that it seems like it is trying too hard to look fancy and this can come off looking a bit cheap, a lot like the fake gold in an Emirates first-class suite. This type of decor looks jarring in a modern building and while there are some people who find this style attractive it’s unlikely that it will appeal to you unless your name is Donald Trump or Snoop Dogg.

The hotel also has spa treatment rooms plus a bar and a restaurant with a focus on grilled meat.

Free Wi-Fi wireless internet access is available throughout the hotel.

The hotel bills itself as an eco-hotel and it says that its mission is to reduce the guest’s carbon footprint by 25%; however, it is difficult to see how they can accomplish this when it is located in an area where the closest public transport option is the nearby heliport.

Rafayel on the Left Bank is on the southern bank of the River Thames in a newly redeveloped area with modern flats and offices. There is a lovely riverside pathway that runs alongside the River Thames and there are quite a few places to eat and drink nearby, although these can be difficult to find as they’re scattered throughout the neighbouring residential buildings.

Although the hotel is reasonably close to Central London (it is possible to walk from here along the riverside to Westminster in less than 1½ hours), it does not have the best public transport connections and it takes around 15 minutes to walk to Clapham Junction station.

Clapham Junction sees 2000 trains a day with a train departing every 30 seconds; this makes it the world’s busiest station by train movements (but not by passengers). From here it takes only seven minutes to get to London Victoria (with trains every two minutes) and 11 minutes to get to London Waterloo (with trains every three minutes). You can also get direct trains to Gatwick Airport from here with a journey time of 25 minutes (and trains every 10 minutes).

The Thames Clipper riverboat is another transport option. Although it is more expensive than the bus, tube or train, it is only an eight-minute walk to Plantation Wharf pier and from here it is a very pleasant 38-minute cruise to Blackfriars.

So, while a 15-minute walk to the station is not particularly good when compared to other hotels elsewhere in London, once you get to the station you have excellent transport connections into Central London and you also have the option of paying a little more to commute into Central London by boat.

Car parking is available but it costs £20 per day.