Krakow – Ibis Centrum

I got to spend one more day than anticipated in Krakow, so I moved after three days in the Ibis Stare Miasto to the Ibis Centrum. They’re about 30 minutes walk apart, but they’re on opposite sides of the city, so neither are more than a 15-minute walk from the city centre.

A clean and comfortable room, one of the more modern Ibis designs. There are a decent number of plug sockets, the lighting is sufficient and it feels a welcoming room environment.

Talking of a welcoming room environment, this made it much more inviting. This is the acknowledgement of my Accor status, and it’s the perfect way of acknowledging it as far as I’m concerned. Four cakes and also a pack of apple flavoured and sugar coated biscuits. Very lovely. I’ll stick with Accor because they give me free cake, it’s not the most sophisticated of concepts but it works for me.

Collecting my free drink of white wine at the bar, I was also given these biscuits, which were much appreciated. What a most lovely welcome to a hotel, all this free food and drink. The only slight downside was that there was an enormous party of school children in the downstairs restaurant, although I confined myself to just sitting at the bar out of their way. I noticed a couple of other diners weren’t impressed, but I suppose that there’s not much that the hotel can do about it without turning large groups away. They were also pretty well behaved, albeit a little loud.

Conscious that the school party might take up most of the breakfast room and get in my way of selecting what food I wanted to eat too much of, I went down to breakfast early. One complaint I have is that I had no idea what time breakfast started, it was never mentioned at reception and there was no room information folder or similar to help me ascertain how early I could go down. 06:30 seems to be the standard time for Ibis, so I went down at 06:45 hoping it was open, and it was and there were already quite a few guests there. But no school children, so breakfast was peaceful.

Some of the breakfast selection, which mainly revolved around hot dogs, cold meats, cheeses, salad items and there were also pastries, cakes and cereals available. In addition to the food, there was tea, coffee, juices and the like to choose from as well. It was a perfectly acceptable breakfast and it was all well presented.

Despite seemingly having half of a school staying at the hotel, I didn’t notice any noise disturbance internally, so my sleep was uninterrupted. The staff at the hotel were all helpful (although it’s rare in Poland for them not to be) and everything was clean and well maintained. I think on balance that I prefer this hotel to the Ibis Stare Miasto though…