When it comes to all my various travel plans and wishes, the part I spend the most time thinking and deciding about is where I’m going to be staying once I arrive at a certain location. I have been quite lucky with some of my choices in the past, there were some less than optimal options as well, but in general, I’ve made good decisions when it comes to the hotels I stayed at. The same could be said about my latest adventure, mainly staying in hotels in Germany, with an odd one out in London as well, for that one night before heading back home.
With the plan ending up taking me to Munich and Dortmund at first, I had some preferences about what the hotels should offer. The main one being the location. In Munich, I just wanted to be somewhere close to the train station, because I knew I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time in the morning getting to the station. Luckily, there’s a lot of options in the vicinity of the train station in the city, so I had many options to choose from. Some would say that that is usually not the best of situations, I would be among those people as well, but factor in the amount of money I was willing to spend for that one night, the search results got narrowed down quite quickly. I was still left with plenty to choose from, but I ended up staying at the Hotel Stachus, about 5 minutes of walking away from the station.
The hotel itself looked nothing special out front, the lobby and the reception area were relatively on the smaller side, both these things kind of merged into one, but it looked quite modern to me and I had a good feeling about the vibe of the place from the get-go. The room was amazing! It wasn’t the biggest, of course, since I basically just needed a bed and a bathroom to be able to shower, and the room was excellent in that regard! The bed was big, nicely firm, as I prefer to have a bit of a firmer bed, and the bathroom was spacious. Spoiler alert – it was the best out of all the hotels I’ve stayed at on this trip, talking only about the bathroom. It was still on a bit of an expensive side of hotels, but comparing the price to the other hotels in the area, it was among the lower ones, especially for what the hotel eventually looked like on the inside. And as you can see from the cover photo of this post, the view, in the morning at least, looked rather lovely, as good as it can look in the middle of a big city anyway.
I know I’ve been going on about the bathroom a lot, but it really is one of the things that can make or break (so-to-speak) a hotel room. As you will see later on, I wasn’t as fortunate in my other hotel stays when it comes to that. Yeah, I was able to shower and do everything I needed to, but when you literally can’t even spread your arms out, it doesn’t really feel that good, to me at least.
Then, we come to Dortmund. As I mentioned before, location was one of the main points I was deciding on when looking for hotels. Since I didn’t really know what the public transport network looks like in Dortmund, how long it would take me to get from one side of the city to the other, I was able to find a hotel, the Steigenberger Hotel, just across the street from the location where the sim racing expo was being held. The price was lower than in Munich, not by much to be honest but still, and with the hotel being branded as a 4-star hotel on Booking, I had high expectations of it. Let me tell you that I was left disappointed by it in the end. The whole lobby/reception area was much bigger and a lot nicer than in Munich, and the hotel features a bar right there as well. I didn’t go to the said bar, just to make this clear right away, but the option was still there. The first impressions of the room itself were great as well! A spacious bed, the whole room being quite big as well, but the bathroom was a huge disappointment. There was a sink, separate to the actual “bathroom”, divided by a stained glass door which revealed a shower and a toilet. Like I said, standing in there and facing the shower, I literally couldn’t spread my arms out since the space was so tiny. The shower was decent enough, nothing to be too excited about, but it did the job and I was okay with that. One major downside of the hotel, or maybe just the particular room I was in, was the internet connection. You were able to connect to the public hotel WiFi network, but the signal was super weak and very very laggy. In the end I figured out the one specific spot where the internet worked how it was supposed to, but being sat at that spot in a way I did wasn’t comfortable at all. I know it was probably one of the busiest times in the year for the hotel, but having such problems with the internet, in this day and age, doesn’t really fill you with a lot of confidence. The contact I had with the staff was professional and pleasant, so can’t really say anything about that, but I was still a bit disappointed with the whole experience over those couple of nights there.
The last hotel on the trip and of this post was the one in London, on my way back home already. It was a bit of a quick decision, due to the time constraints I would have to deal with otherwise, and I didn’t spend as much time researching it as I usually do, and it showed. The main focus of my decision this time around was the price. I knew how the Underground worked at that point, so I knew that it wasn’t going to be a problem getting to and from the hotel, so the location wasn’t as important with this. I chose the Dolphin Hotel, which looked like it offered a decent enough rooms for a decent price. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed when I arrived at the hotel. I did think to myself, good thing I wasn’t staying there for longer, because it would have been quite an unpleasant experience. The staff were all super nice, no doubt about that, but the room itself was super small, was barely able to turn around without hitting anything in the room, and the bathroom followed suit as well. I mean, I knew I shouldn’t have expected a 5-star hotel experience for that price, but still.
When I look back on all the hotels I’ve stayed at, one could say that I haven’t really had the most luck in picking the hotels this time around. Each of them having both good and bad sides, but all in all, I had a bed to sleep in, a bathroom to use and that’s basically all you need. It showed that I was a bit rusty, in terms of travelling, searching for hotels and all that, so hoping all that is gone now and next hotel(s) I choose will be a great one and I’ll be able to tick all my boxes with it! 🙂
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