hanging off the Shard

Shard Hotel: great views of neighbour in bath!
metro.co.uk/2014/05/11/design-flaw-in-the-shard-lets-people-see-into-their-neighbours-rooms-4723992

Some interesting reviews of the Shangri-La Hotel at the Shard

One of the most disappointing hotel stays that I have ever had. Whilst the view is of course breath-taking, the rooms and service are very poor. The room I stayed in probably had the loudest air-conditioning system known to man, and if you were to turn it off then the room became very stuffy. Whilst I told the staff of this problem on my departure, I got the distinct impression that this was a recurring problem.
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The room, on the 46th floor, was cold and no adjustment of the temperature control would improve it. The corridor was a great place to warm up. When the room was turned out, I was left a cigarette stub on the mat by my bed. The bathroom is well appointed. Marble floors are great if they don't get wet. The shower door cannot be opened if the floor mat is not removed before hand. Then you have wet marble. Design fault?
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Function room music kept us from sleeping - we were eventually moved but this shouldn't be an issue at this price. New room had a noisy pipe and maintenance needed to visit to fix, keeping us up until 1am! Some fixtures and fittings weren't installed properly, missing screws or bent out of place. Constant stream of non-guests heading up to the cocktail bar made using the lifts miserable, with rowdy drinkers coming up and down most of the evening. Didn't really feel like a luxury hotel, and we left tired and miserable.
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I felt the room set up was really odd. we had a premium corner room with views from all sides, but with a TV and chunky cabinet in the middle, a couch on one side and a table on the other, a lot of the wow factor was lost behind wood block furniture. But most funda-mentally, you may have seen reports that you can see into other peoples rooms. I don't know from other rooms, but from ours you could directly see into others, including the bed area, which means they can also see into ours. This could be avoided by drawing the blinds, but then you lose the extremely expensive view and could be anywhere. This is a really fundamental flaw.
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The smoke alarm went off for 10 minutes around midnight and luckily we were still awake or it would be really annoying, as we weren’t sure whether we should be leaving or staying, as no information was given at all.
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Over priced and under trained staff, relying too much on the view that is actually not that great, even if you pay over £2,000 for a room
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In the morning we woke up to an amazing view of the city skyline. 10 minutes later the exterior blinds came fully down, blocking the view and leaving the room in total darkness. We tried pressing the buttons but only the interior blinds went down and up. The exterior blinds stayed down. We contacted Reception and were told the problem had to be fixed externally by the Engineering team. We sat in the darkened room for approximately one hour before the blinds were raised. Not good.

Fed up of waiting in the dark, my wife went to the bathroom to get ready. She discovered the light in the make-up mirror didn’t work. And that she had been bitten while asleep in the bed (not by me). My forehead had also come up in a rash of tiny red bumps. I travel around South and South East Asia and rarely get bitten so this was upsetting.
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The room was nicely furnished with some great touches, binoculars, freshly brewed tea in a leather basket, great bath products. However, in a brand new hotel one expects movies on demand and a greater selection of channels. The bath was positioned behind an open shower so that, if one person was in the bath and another was showering, the person in the bath would get soaked from the shower. Equally, to fill the bath took 25 mins.

Someone had thoughtfully left two condoms by the bed!!!!! Is this some kind of hotel policy to replace night time poems or chocolates with Durex, we wondered? We have stayed in Shangri La hotels all over Asia, and first, second and third class hotels all over the world, right down to a tin shack in Peru, and not once have we encountered such a disgraceful occurrence.

As we were both exhausted, we decided to deal with the issue in the morning, however, at 4am we were awoken by a very loud announcement that the hotel may have to be evacuated, please await further instructions". This was on a 30 second loop. Neither my husband or I said a word to each other but rather like a scene from Modern Family and with complete co- ordination we threw our belongings into our bags and dressed tout suit. Being on the 47th floor of a prime terrorist target with alarms ringing was suddenly very unappealing.

The staff at reception looked equally as terrified as us but valiantly offered tea to anyone who fancied hanging out on the 35th floor. We descended to the ground floor and amazingly found only one other couple there. A charming Californian couple, he was a bomb disposal expert. You meet the most interesting people at that time in the morning, or so it would appear. Quite frankly we and they were amazed that no body else had thought it at the very least prudent to exit the building. It turned out to be a faulty smoke detector but by the time this news had filtered through to us we were more than half way home and feeling just a little rattled

www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_Review-g186338-d6484754-Reviews-or10-Shangri_La_Hotel_At_The_Shard_London-London_England.html#REVIEWS

Nice view if you pick the right time.
www.ipernity.com/doc/292367/37234952/in/group/25971

But you have to prebook and could just as easily get weather like this.