Hotel in London Reserved - What Do You Think

Because we have a few days in London we needed to locate something that was out of the city.  Somewhere close to Micheal's home, but still close to a metro line, especially the Central Line.

Micheal offered us his home to stay at but we really don't want to put him out and three nights is a lot when you are just back from your contract on the ship, three teenagers, and a wife who has not seen you in three months!

Since I don't really know London that well I had to do quite a bit of research.  I hit all my favorite sites.  Kayak, Trip Advisor, Hotels.com, Google Maps, Priceline and anything else that showed up in my search results.  Oh beware.  When doing search results for hotels I often got fooled with search results that seemed like I was booking with the actual hotel when in fact it was a booking site.  What is worse I did the exact same thing once before and only clued in when I was chatting online with the booking site that they really did not know much about the property.  I clued in and hung up and got in touch directly with the hotel.  Sneaky buggers.

We ended up settling on the Ibis London Stratford. Located in Stratford just east of London.  Only a 30 min tube ride to downtown and a 25 minute ride to Michael's home.   We will see how it goes.  Also the price was much more reasonable than staying downtown.

Our flight arrives around 9 am into Gatwick and since we are flying all night (well only five hours) I know we will not want to hang out around London with our cases waiting for check in time.  Our hotel allows up to add a small fee and have early check in from 10 am.  Perfect!