Reasonable Prices + Great Shopping Location In Dublin (Academy Hotel Dublin)

Member Name: louiseypees

Product:	Academy Hotel Dublin
Date:	16/12/08 (84 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great rooms, great service, good location for hitting the shops

Disadvantages: A bit of a walk to Temple Bar and Grafton Street, expensive dining and limited salon

Having been to Dublin a number of times with my best friend, and listening to her rave about how much she loved the place for years after each trip, there was only one possible location for the hen do I was asked to help organise for her. Dublin is a fantastic location for a hen party, with bars a-plenty and hundreds of Irish men who are all the more eager to talk to you when you're in a pub dressed in fluffy devil horns. The hen do in question was last weekend, and it was great fun - helped largely by our decision to book into this fantastic hotel.

The Academy Hotel is owned by Best Western, and it has a 4* rating. Its location just of O'Connell street is perfect for shopping, but slightly less perfect for Temple Bar, which is about a ten minute walk up O'Connell street and over the Liffey. Having said that, we were really happy with the location even though we intended to go out in Temple Bar - a taxi is easy to come by and relatively cheap at about Euro8 after 11pm.

When you walk into the lobby area of the hotel, you immediately see just what kind of a place you're in - the lobby and lounge are spacious and modern in shiny white with black accents. There are a couple of free-to-use Apple Macs opposite the reception desk, and a lounge area complete with squashy black leather chairs between the reception and the lift. The lobby looks beautiful and modern, giving high hopes for the remainder of the hotel.

The reception staff couldn't be more helpful - we used them a few times over our stay, booking taxis, arranging late check out times and enquiring about spa treatments, and each person we came into contact with was polite, knowledgeable and pleasant - even though we were probably not their ideal clientele, being a group of hens in fancy dress.

Even the lifts on the way to the rooms are impressive - mirrored, with a chequerboard shiny floor, they're a well-thought-out touch - a girl has to check her hair one final time on her way out, after all!

The bedrooms we had were fantastic. Memory foam mattresses, huge double showers, a wall-mounted LCD TV (complete with chargeable internet access and a wireless keyboard), great lighting (with almost too many options), and - a bit of a geek point for me - enough visible plug sockets to plug in my hairdryer, straighteners and my phone charger! The rooms were spotlessly clean.

The beds are almost criminally comfortable, and come with wall-mounted squashy faux-ostrich skin headboards, the fluffiest pillows you could ever dream of (I'm very much a two pillow girl at home, but one was more than enough here) and a huge fluffy duvet. Getting ready for a night out after a long day and a hangover took a lot longer than planned with beds this good!

The hotel's facilities include two restaurants, neither of which we tried, for one main reason - they are very pricey! There is also Harry's Bar and Bistro, which we had a couple of drinks in. It feels very much like a typical hotel bar, albeit a well-lit and comfortable one, and it is priced as you would expect a hotel bar to be - not particularly cheaply. We suffered a lot because of the exchange rate, having picked the worst weekend in the history of the pound-euro rate, but even so, it was about the same prices as the most expensive of the Temple Bar pubs (which are not pleasant at all).

Also on site they claim to have a spa. Further probing helped us to establish that they in fact have a treatment room and one beautician, who doesn't work Sundays. Not ideal, then, for our party of four who each wanted two treatments... on a Sunday. But I must say, the treatments list was very extensive, and actually very reasonably priced. Had I been there with my boyfriend or just one other person, I definitely would've been more tempted!

Having had my two minor whinges, I'll go on to completely ignore them. If you want a hotel for a reasonably priced bar and its spa, then this, and most other hotels in central Dublin probably won't be ideal for you. If you want great service, an incredibly comfortable bed, a gorgeous room and a little bit of luxury, then I'd definitely recommend you try this place out.

We paid £100 for each of our twin rooms, which could easily have slept three people because of the one double and one single bed in each. Doubles were £90 each when I booked, and I found these prices on lastminute.com

Summary: A bargain on lastminute.com - a great hotel