Express By Holiday Inn Aberdeen City (Express By Holiday Inn Aberdeen)

Member Name: sgathach

Product:	Express By Holiday Inn Aberdeen
Date:	30/05/07 (235 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Proximity to shops and nghtlife

Disadvantages: Parking and noise depending on which room you get

Holiday Inn Express Aberdeen

This hotel is a modern, purpose built hotel with 155 bedrooms.

We Stayed at this Hotel on Friday the 18th and Saturday the 19th of May 2007. We were meeting two of our friends and wanted somewhere near central Aberdeen.

Location: Chapel Street, off Union Street; the main thoroughfare of Aberdeen, with The Bon Accord Shopping Centre and various pubs, eateries and lots of little side streets with exclusive shops.

Cost: Four person bedroom: double bed and sofa bed: £55.00 per room, per night.

The main Entrance has a Small reception area with a few comfortable sofas and a bar area to the left with further comfortable seating, coffee tables and two large screen televisions.

The staff were very friendly and courteous and gave us a warm welcome.

A little further along is the dining area where breakfast is served from 6.30 am to 9.30am weekdays and till 10.30 at the weekend.

I found the breakfast a little lacking in variety, with only cereal, toast, butter, Croissants and some sweet pastries, along with the obligatory marmalade etc. However, right across the road from the main entrance is a lovely little shop that sells bacon rolls and lots of other things, so if you really want something more than a continental breakfast with coffee/tea and juices you can nip over to Ross’s Chapel Street Bakery.

We booked a “Smoking” room, which is a bit smelly as you would expect. The Holiday Inn Express haven’t found a way to fumigate these rooms as efficiently as other “Smoking” room in various other hotels that we have stayed in. However, having expected this I brought along some lovely smelling aromathery oil candles for the room and they seemed to do the business and made the room smell rather nice instead of stuffy with an old smoke smell. (Well I can’t complain it’s me that smokes).

The non-smoking rooms in this hotel are just the opposite, very nicely scented and the hallways all smell fresh and clean, even in the smoking corridor, which is a very big plus for this particular Holiday Inn Express. In comparison the Holiday Inn Express at Glasgow airport, stunk from the minute you got in till the minute you left, even the non-smoking corridors were pervaded with plumes of stinky smoke. Not a place you’d want to stay even as a smoker let alone as a non-smoker.

The bedroom itself is small, but serves its purpose, the double bed is a decent size and the sofa bed has enough room to be put out and you can still move around the room.

It is decorated in an Art Deco style with light coloured and blue wood. Very basic but okay and not unpleasant to look at. There is a 24” colour television with all the normal channels and some pay for movie channels as you would expect in an hotel like this.

The bed has bedside tables with Art Deco style lamps on either side and there is a dressing table with another lamp and a few shelves underneath the unit that the television sits on.

There is an “Open” wardrobe with eight hangers and a few shelves underneath. A full length mirror with a hairdryer hanging on the wall next to it. A few power points and two phone jacks so you can log on to web if you wish, this costs £15.00 for 24 hours, a lot of money perhaps, but if you are working away from home it is sometimes worth the cost.

The hotel has a high-speed wireless network.

Downstairs in the lobby are a few computers hooked up to the internet that you can pay for on an hourly basis. You can pay for this by credit card or by purchasing a pin number from the reception.

The bathroom was clean and small but neatly appointed, with a corner sink, a sizeable shower, toilet that can be separated by the bathroom door closing it in and locking. This can be handy if you have booked in with children and you need to shower and someone needs to use the toilet.

There is no bath, which I hate, but hey, we were only there for two nights so I figured I’d survive.

The toiletries are a little lacking, Dove hand wash is supplied in a container affixed to the left of the sink area and a Dove body wash container is attached to the wall inside the shower.

Two large bath towels, two small hand towels and two throw away facecloths are supplied, although if you have more than two occupants, I’m sure you’d get a few more.

The pillows on the bed aren’t the biggest or the best and you only get one apiece, so lucky for us there were the two “spare” pillows for the sofa bed in a dust-proof bag above the hanging wardrobe area.

There is coffee/tea making “station” attached to the wall, with a small kettle and insufficient supplies of tea/coffee/milk and sugar. So take your own, or go downstairs and request extra supplies.

You can also get items like toothbrushes, razors, cotton buds, nail files and emergency sanitary items from reception if you’ve forgotten anything.

There was a heater in the room and no air-conditioning, which was fine as it was warm and we didn’t need the heating on. If we were too hot, we could have opened the window fully to let some air in.

This was okay for us as our room was on the side of the building and you couldn’t really hear the noise from the road and as the hotel is a few hundred yards from the main road Union Street. The noise levels weren’t bad and we got good nights sleep.

It’s a bit of a different story if you are at the front of the hotel where you can’t really open your window as the streets are cleaned for a few hours every night and it’s rather noisy.

Ironing rooms are located at the rear of the building on each floor.

There is a daily laundry service which includes dry cleaning services.

This particular hotel welcomes small house trained dogs, not something I’ve come across before.

There are safe deposit boxes but not in the rooms, they are only available at the reception desk.

All plug sockets in the hotel are 200/240 volt. There is a dual voltage socket (110/120 or 220/240) in the bathroom and they recommend for your own safety you don’t charge your electric razor using these sockets.

The hotel operates a wake up service which is utilised through the bedroom television; you just have to follow the on screen instructions.

I found our stay at this hotel a pleasant experience and good value for money. There are no frills here, just basic clean accommodation, which is very near to all the nightlife and shopping facilities that Aberdeen has to offer, it is also only a ten minute walk to the train station.

One drawback for this hotel is the lack of parking, there are a few parking spaces through an archway attached to the hotel, but we had to park in a multi-storey NCP car park at the end of Chapel Street, saying that though, it’s only a few minutes walk away and the parking is free all weekend, so we weren’t complaining.

Another drawback is that the hotel doesn’t have its own restaurant, but there are plenty within walking distance to suit all tastes and pocket sizes.

I think if I had to go to stay in Aberdeen again, I would return to this hotel as it’s very convenient for the city and all it has to offer.

p.s There is a lovely little pub just around the corner called “Filthy McNasty’s”, but that’s another story!

Summary: A basic, clean hotel near to the shops and nightlife