Be careful with the small rooms here. This hotel is in a decent area as its easy to walk over the bridge, hop a ferry, walk to Galata Tower, etc. I think the location is fine.
The help was friendly too. What you have to be careful is that they have some nice rooms, and some cheaper rooms and there is a HUGE difference. So you can see comments and ratings from some that had the good rooms and think everything is just wonderful. However someone in the tiny rooms will have a very different experience. The photos posted on websites for booking and info often show the good rooms. When you get there you might have something altogether different!!!
My room I got on hotwire. It said 4 star hotel and made it sound wonderful, but of course you dont know the name of the hotel, but you do know the area. The area is good. I knew the hotel I would get on hotwire as there was a site running that told you the names of the hotel before you buy, but that site has now been shut down. It was not part of hotwire of course.
When I get there I see its a tiny room. No table, no desk, no chair, and nowhere to open your suitcase unless you lay it on your bed! Add to that no place to look out. If you pull the drapes hoping to get some light you find a window with a cement wall outside about 18 inches away. Not much light gets in here at all. They have painted a picture of a Palm Tree and a beach on the cement wall! Can you believe this! I will hunt my pictures and post it!
I like to spend a lot of time online but the internet is very slow here. Plus no place to sit property so you have to sit on the bed and place the laptop on the bed and that isnt a comfortable way to type.
The air conditioning unit was over the bed as there was no other place to put it I guess. It dripped water onto the bed from condensation. Drip drip drip, so I always had a folded towel over that spot to catch most of the drip.
So this was my 4 star hotel??? No--more like a 2 star if that. Maybe other people who booked the better rooms got a 4 star experience, but to sell this as a 4 star hotel on hotwire is just a total lie.
The breakfast is always served in the lobby even though there is a rooftop deck. I didnt find the breakfast all that good. Lots of big white bowls but not much of interest in them. The coffee and the orange drink were TERRIBLE!
The photos on websites often showed a beautiful open deck on top, but now its glassed in and its hard to even take a good picture up there. Yes maybe in winter this is preferable but I was there in fairly nice weather and this glassed in area now is not nearly so appealing as what I saw in the pictures online.
I did not eat any other meals at the hotel other than the included breakfast. With so much good food everywhere in Istanbul I wasnt motivated to even try here.
So if you book the type of room yourself and opt for the more expensive rooms you will have a much better experience. Not often do you find a hotel with such drastic differences of quality of rooms right alongside each other. They even put two people in this room and I dont know how they do it!.
The hotel manager would often sit in the lobby on his computer. He didnt seem to ever speak to any guests and just sat on the computer day or night. I talked about the small room and other issues to the front desk help but didnt bother with him as he appeared to take no interest in anyone there and only buried himself in his laptop. Maybe he couldnt speak other languages?? I have no idea. I asked the help who he was and they said the manager but I didnt bother saying anything to him as nowdays there are much better ways like yelp, trip advisor, and more to make your point heard. I find you tell them and you get nowhere. You tell the world and they often wake up! So now I have done that.
The hotel was built long before the days where people started to rate their hotel experience online. Too bad the builders didnt know online rating was coming, as including these terrible mini rooms is going to make a hotels rating suffer. read more
