Four Seasons Ten Trinity follow-up

Four Seasons Ten Trinity, London
Room type: Trinity Heritage Suite
Duration: 11th > 13th August, 2017
Booked with: Dorsia Travel

As part of my once-in-a-life-time, around-the-world tour of forgiveness, I wanted to give Four Seasons Ten Trinity another go after their somewhat interesting approach to opening night. Long story short, they guaranteed me an upgrade into a suite, and kindly provided an upgrade to an even higher suite category: Trinity Heritage Suite – currently their second best available suite at 100sqm.

No, screw that, you must listen to the long story.  I’m the self-obsessed writer here, not you.

Once upon a time, a young, dashingly handsome, in fact, stupidly handsome.  Really, really, really good looking man, went along to Four Seasons Ten Trinity on opening night and had a disastrous stay.  After chats with senior management, an olive branch was created.  6 months later, he reached out to this branch.  The suites, spa, and Mei Umu, their Japanese Restaurant, were now open, so said handsome man wanted to go back.  The big, bad, mean faceless corporation then refused to honour their own agreement and to upgrade me, I mean him, to one from an Executive (i.e. the one category down from a suite). They offered an upgrade from Superior to Executive, which wasn’t what was agreed, nor wanted.  Their counter offer was to offer free breakfast if a suite was booked – something you can receive for free with any FHR/Virtuoso/FSPP booking, along with many more benefits.  So they just retracted the new breakfast offer and went back to the original room upgrade offer.

I own an IT business, so let me put my customer service skills to some use.  This would be like me offering an unhappy customer £200 compensation, only for them to say it’s not enough, so I offer them £70 compensation or something that is in fact worthless, for them to say it’s even worse, and then for me to return to my original offer.

My one last attempt at justice was to contact the GM.  Within less than an hour, apologies were forthcoming and a suite upgrade was offered.  Huzzah.

So, what was new?  The smell of a fresh building still prevails around the hotel, yet there was something far more important than a fragrance festival taking place: the spa.  The spa is really beautiful and looks amazing, with its excellent use of lighting, swimming pool, hydrotherapy pool and sauna, but it doesn’t have the same luxury feeling as The Lanesborough. In fact, whilst the facilities it offers are, by my standards, better than any other London hotel spa, I would still gladly pick The Lanesborough ahead of it. This is, as always, an emotional decision, and it is mostly down to the fact that at The Lanesborough it is incredibly private; no children and definitely no crowds. During our 3 days, Ten Trinity spa felt like a social scene. They just needed a barbers to have banal conversations with, beside the pool to put the icing on the cake.  They also say their hydrotherapy pool is 36-38C, which is simply a lie, and therefore unforgivable.  No one puts me in the freezing corner.

It also wasn’t helped by how awkward it was to get from our room to the spa, as we would go down in our robes and needed to walk through the Rotunda to get there.  On the Friday evening, people were having business meetings, so it started to feel like a peep show.  They may have been the only guests all weekend.  I know it’s August and London is always dead, but I still worry for their long-term viability due to how empty the hotel was. On Friday night we counted 9 guests and 7 staff in Rotunda.

Service was not really the issue last time, and here it was just as impressive, with everyone knowing who we were and delivering a great experience.  We had a great welcome, with some personalised amenities and Charlie, the GM, coming over to talk to us.  The Rotunda restaurant was on even finer form than opening night, with some really excellent dishes, but this passion and quality did not cross over to Mei Umu, their Japanese and Chinese restaurant in one.  It offers decent enough quality sushi, but the Chinese food was deeply disappointing and no comparison at all to Hakassan or Kai, which are both about 20% cheaper and at least twice as good. I would not return.

Up next: our suite.  When we first entered our room we thought we were still in the hallway of the hotel, so impressive is the entrance. An entrance fit for a king. Or a guest who complained a lot. Our room gives the wow factor in the huge entrance and high ceilings beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in London, but the more time I spent there the more it reminded me somewhat of PH Vienna, in that the lack of decoration and emptiness of it started to make it feel somewhat cheap. They both also use Bottega Veneta toiletries. That’s actually where the similarities end. It wasn’t a good comparison, please forgive me.

Just to give an idea of how high the ceilings are, this beautiful model kindly posed for me:

Their suites are currently all on the ground floor, and as per pretty much every other London hotel, being on the ground floor guarantees you can feel the Tube. Feeling the Tube may sound like an excellent name for a band, but the only thing it has in common with music is that it’s as annoying as Nickelback.

There were elements of the room that also did not feel finished, such as a lack of any plugs by the desk, underfloor heating being too hot or not working, and, just like last time, the shower playing up, although luckily it did not flood the room this time and instead just went cold for 3 minutes at a time. Worst of all, walking from our room to the spa involved walking through the main entrance, so some lucky bankers got to enjoy my catwalk down to the spa. Luckily for them, I decided to wear a robe and not just go in my speedos.  Upon mentioning the issue of the shower, we went out for dinner, came back and had some chocolates waiting for us and an apology note. Very classy touch, I thought. They were also replacing the Vos water and fruits every day, which is not something normally provided.

We were woken up at 6am from a fire alarm going off – another reoccurrence of the opening day. It only went off for a few seconds, but was enough to wake us up and assume North Korea was attacking.

Conclusion