Sharing is caring!

Our review of a stay in a Hilton Deluxe room at London Gatwick using Maple Parking Meet & Greet

Before our trip to Tanzania we booked a room at the Hilton Hotel at London Gatwick with Holiday Extras. The deal with Holiday Extras combined car parking with Maple Parking Meet & Greet too.

Our booking which would have cost £239.86 but was provided to us by Holiday Extras was well worth the cost for the 5 of us. Parking alone for 12 nights would have been £150 and the hotel far more than the extra £80.

You can check out the Holiday Extra deals here:

We arrived at the Hiton London Gatwick at 7.30pm on a Sunday evening after a long drive down from the North West. We did have a bit of a hitch as Maple Parking didn’t recognise our booking so the parking element of the meet & greet sadly wasn’t overly successful initially. The staff at the Hilton couldn’t have done enough to help though as Maple Parking themselves were particularly unhelpful and sadly we had arrived after the Holiday Extras team had left for the evening. It took a while (over an hour sadly), but it was resolved and they took our car away to park for the 10 nights. Coming back the service was impeccable.

The Hilton hotel itself is in a huge 1960s building. It’s wide rather than tall, with over 800 rooms on four floors. It’s a big hotel and getting from our room to the executive lounge took over 5 minutes and we were on the same floor!

Our deluxe room was huge.  We had plenty of room for the extra bed and more room besides. It really was unusually large for an airport hotel.

The room itself was clean and functional. It’s an old style hotel and whilst there is enough connectivity (the wifi was excellent and included in our room rate)  it would have been good to have sockets next to the beds for charging and alarm use at the same time. Particularly important when you’re off on a long haul flight the next day.

The kids made use of the room wifi almost immediately and I went to check out the Executive Lounge.

The Executive lounge offers private check-in, complimentary continental breakfast and refreshments during the day, PC and Wi-Fi. There is also a shower available. It is open between 6:00 am – 11:00 pm.

Complimentary canapes and drinks are served daily between 6:30pm and 8:30pm however due to the mix up with the parking we didn’t actually get to our room after the drinks had finished.

I dispatched hubby to the hotel bar to buy us some gin and tonics to drink in the room (to be fair room service is available but he fancied a look round) and he came back with two doubles, and £26 lighter! That’s steep for two drinks, even in London and even at an airport.

We got ready for bed and all slept really well. The hotel does have soundproofing and we didn’t hear any aircraft noise at all.  The beds were comfy enough, even the extra one, although our double did have a slight tendency to roll me to the middle.

It was nice to have a fairly decent wake up time as our flight was at 10am, too early for us to drive down from the North but a lovely civilised time when staying at the airport the night before.

As we had access to the executive lounge we could enjoy the complimentary breakfast before our flight and this included toast, cereal, fruit, yoghurts, croissants, lots of tea, coffee and juice and even bacon and sausages too.

Having finished breakfast it really was lovely to just walk through the connected walkway into the South Terminal of Gatwick airport with no stress at all.

There is also a handy Costa just near check in if you want to grab an early morning coffee or quick breakfast. It is open 5:00 am – 7:00 pm.

Overall I’d say our stay at the Hilton Hotel was pleasant. Not incredible in terms of style and luxury, but definitely comfortable and functional and really useful place to stay before an early flight. I was impressed with the pricing through Holiday Extras too.