Apollo Hotel Utrecht City Centre

Nothing

The heating in my room did not work properly the first evening of my stay. It was turned off and I woke up in the middle of the night because it was so cold (a cold night room full of windows) and when I turned on it did not have capacity to heat room. I called the front desk who wondered why I was not using a space heater (!) which the room did not have anyway. So the hotel is aware that they have a heating problem but do not turn off the heat anyway. This was because when the radiators are turned on they make the room too hot so that you need to open a window - which is what happened the second night where I slept with turned up radiators and wide open windows. The location is city center and loud so sleeping with open windows is hard because of the noise. The final morning of my stay the shower did not work (no water from the shower) so I needed to take a sponge bath from the sink. When the maintenance arrived (pretty quickly to be fair) they fixed the problem but by then it was too late because I had no more time as I had appointments. The hotel is not inexpensive enough to justify ‘hostel style’ conditions.

The location to the Tivoli and the train station.

Bad, uncomfortable experience. For starters, to get to your room you have to get through a maze that involves going through an underground connecting hallway and two elevators. The room has no AC and it doesn't even have a frigobar. There is a monitor in the room (weirdly located at an unusual angle that you cannot change, not located in front of your bed like in most normal hotels) and it only has access to YouTube, not to actual TV programs. The shower has no curtain or door so the entire bathroom floods when you take a shower. They didn't replace the soap containers when they ran out of soap so I had to ask the reception to give me refills. At one point, I asked for a bucket of ice at the reception and they looked at me like I had three heads (I'm not kidding) and suggested I should go get ice from the Kentucky Fried Chicken store next door! At check out they wanted me to pay again for my stay, when it had already been prepaid prior to my check in. Really? All this and you call yourself a 4-star hotel? I'd say you barely get 2 stars and they do not shine.