Belmond The Cadogan vs Four Seasons Hotel London at Park Lane

Sixty-seven keys, and it behaves like a house with sixty-seven keys: staff learn your name by the first night, and the small gestures pile up fast. One couple mentioned an Arsenal game in passing at check-in and found official scarves waiting in their room two nights later. Another family got a teddy bear dressed on their daughter's bed and an anniversary cake they hadn't asked for. General manager Russell Pratt gets thanked by name often enough that he's clearly setting the tone rather than getting lucky once. The Chelsea location, opposite the private garden and a few minutes from Sloane Street and the Kings Road, is the other thing nobody argues with.

The catch is the base room. Deluxe rooms run small for the money, more than one guest has said the photos oversell the square footage, and one traveller was quietly rebooked from a junior suite into a standard room by a third-party booking error, only finding out the day before arrival. Book above the Deluxe category if you can. Wellness is thin too: there's no real spa program, and the gym has simply been shut during at least one recent stay with no fix offered. This is a townhouse, not a resort, and it doesn't pretend otherwise once you're standing in an empty gym.

Suite rooms are where the money is well spent: the marble-and-mosaic bathrooms get called out constantly, and Willetts' risotto and breakfast come up by name rather than as generic five-star box-ticking. One guest fought a billing dispute after a broken radiator went unfixed on night two, the sourest note in months of otherwise glowing accounts. Book a junior suite for the townhouse at its best: the marble bathrooms, Willetts downstairs, and staff who'll know your name by dinner.

What you're paying for at Park Lane isn't drama, it's competence. Andrei's team remembered a diaper pail request without being asked twice; Amanda in events kept a full family baptism running smoothly outside her working hours because she wanted to, not because the job required it. Pavyllon and Bar Antoine are the genuine culinary highlight here, well ahead of the rest of the hotel, and the quiet, blackout-curtained rooms on a residential Mayfair side street between Hyde Park and Green Park make this one of the better jet-lag cures in the city, kids in tow or not.

The catch is that the money doesn't stretch as far as it should once you're past the room rate. Breakfast has become a real sore point: billed à la carte against an allowance rather than complimentary, and more than one guest has had to chase down overcharges on top of a service charge already added to the bill. The renovated rooms have odd quirks too, like doorless closets and a single light switch shared between bathroom and bedroom, and there's no real pool, just a spa vitality pool, which stings more the closer you look at what a night here actually costs.

Worth booking if what you actually want is effortless, well-drilled comfort and a location that's hard to beat for walking the parks and Mayfair shopping. If it's history in the walls you're after, look at Claridge's or the Dorchester instead; this one wins on everything that happens after check-in.