Warsaw – Ibis Styles Warszawa West
As I carry on working my way around the Accor hotels in Warsaw, this one is located a little outside of the centre and I took a train to reach it. Although I’m walking back as it’ll let me meander through some parts of the city that I haven’t seen before.
The hotel reception and layout feels quite old-fashioned and I’m unsure why it’s an Ibis Styles. There’s no design-led element to the hotel, it’s all quite bland. Actually, it feels like a prison where they’ve put some jazzy lines on the walls to cheer it up a bit.
This is the most, well, unimpressive room that Accor have given me in Poland. It’s functional, although the lights didn’t work but the hotel fixed that when I went to query it. Every Ibis Styles has a theme and I’ve liked the previous Roman, space, canoeing and so on themes. I’m not sure what the theme here is, perhaps it’s communist Poland. The room was sort of clean, but it wasn’t to the standard of the other Accor hotels I’ve visited over the last week.
The desk size wasn’t ideal at all. There are meant to be tea and coffee making facilities in the room, but they didn’t provide any coffee, just tea.
This is the first Accor hotel I can recall staying in where they use coins instead of vouchers for their welcome drink. I wonder whether it’s to avoid the rather generous terms of the voucher…..
There are a diminishing number of Accor hotels that decide that anyone who wants beer must want lager, but this is one of them. I really don’t particularly want generic cheap lager, but that was the sole beer option with the welcome drink voucher. On reflection, I probably should have kept the coin as a souvenir of the hotel.
The breakfast, which was mostly set out in little boxes for hygiene reasons, was fine and I also managed to get more Greek salad as well as fruit salad and apple crumble. Staff served some of the breakfast items, the rest were self-service where they could be covered. All fairly standard Ibis fayre, but since it was included in the room rate, I thought it was entirely reasonable.
The staff in the hotel were helpful, but the state of this hotel is a country mile behind the Mercure Ursus which is only a short distance away. Slightly dishearteningly, given that I’m an Accor fan, this hotel is also way behind the cheap and cheerful Holiday Inn Express I visited yesterday, which sets itself at a lower price point. I suspect this hotel is doing a sustained trade from conferences and group bookings, but their reviews on TripAdvisor aren’t great. I wonder whether Accor would be better off just rebranding this hotel into an Ibis Budget and being done with it.
