"My wife and I spent four nights at this hotel during our trip to Potsdam in early May this year, and here's our experience:
1. The location is ideal, especially for those traveling without a car. The hotel is located on a quiet street a few dozen meters from Luizenplatz and a few hundred meters from the entrance to Sanssouci Park. There are many restaurants, a pedestrian shopping area, and several public transportation stops nearby.
2. The building is in very good condition. It was renovated several years ago, and there are no signs of wear or tear on the building or the rooms.
3. Food - the breakfast was decent, but nothing exceptional. The selection is fairly standard for a German four-star hotel. The fruit selection was a bit limited, even considering it's May. There's a restaurant, but the menu didn't inspire any interest.
3. Room - We stayed in a Deluxe Room. The size was as expected. There was no balcony, but the hotel clearly states when booking that not all rooms of this class have one.
The bathroom is small and extremely inconvenient. The toilet and shower are located together in a small space without adequate ventilation. There's either no forced-air ventilation, or it's so weak that its presence is unnoticeable. The only place to hang towels is on the shower door handle (it swings outward, so everything drips onto the laminate floor, and there's no floor drain). So the towels don't dry. This wouldn't be a big deal, but they don't change them without a special request. Usually, in hotels, just placing the towels on the shower floor in the morning is enough to get them replaced, but no one checks this here.
The room is sparsely furnished – what's there is of good quality, but it's clearly not enough. The bed is okay. There are no nightstands, only two open shelves. The chair is quite nice, but there's nowhere for another person to sit except on the ottoman, and sitting on a backless ottoman for long is uncomfortable. There are no chairs, not a single one, despite the ample space in the room. There's no table as such. There's a 35-centimeter-deep board bolted to the wall, proudly called a desk. The ottoman sits right next to it.
The closet is very small, with barely any hangers.
The cheaper rooms have a kettle and bags of tea, coffee, sugar, and powdered coffee whitener. The De Luxe room promises a coffee machine instead, and it does have one, but it's extremely basic. It makes one type of coffee from capsules and doesn't even dispense boiling water. It comes with four capsules, four sugar packets, and four powdered coffee whitener packets. There's no tea. Over the course of four days, they only replenished the powdered coffee whitener, which we didn't use, but they didn't bother to refill the sugar we used.
I have to give the staff credit – they provided a kettle upon our first request, but they didn't bother to provide tea.
4. Cleanliness
Overall, the hotel is clean. The room was decently cleaned upon arrival, except for some dust on the bottom bunks near the bed. During your stay, cleaning is only upon request, and you're required to request it by 4 PM the day before (in practice, it can be done the same day). This wouldn't be a bad thing, but they also don't check for towels or the availability of coffee, sugar, or tea.
5. Staff
While very friendly, they're ineffective. The current shift forgets to pass on requests to the next. One day, we returned tired and sweaty after a long walk to find the towels still lying on the shower floor – even though we'd never requested cleaning for that day. It took three visits to reception and an hour to change the towels—each time they smiled, nodded, and said "right now," but there was no result.
All in all, this is not the standard of facilities or service one expects from a four-star hotel belonging to a reputable chain. Given that our previous experiences with hotels in this chain had been quite positive, this disappointment felt all the more bitter."
