With the Cricket World Cup and Chinese New Year happening the week I was to travel to Auckland decent, reasonably priced hotels were at a premium and so I ended up at a hotel on Queen Street called the Park Regis. But don’t start thinking that you’ll be staying at anything that looks like the St Regis in New York – far, very far from it.
Park Regis, Auckland, New Zealand
The hotel is an old office building converted into a hotel and my gut feeling is that the conversion was done on the cheap.
Where to start
- this hotel was very expensive for what you got, but I suppose the week I was there it was a sellers market
- the lifts were awful – one time it took 4 attempts for the doors to decide they could close the whole way so we could get moving
- my room was near the lifts so I got the sound of the bell ringing whenever the lift visited my floor.
- the room was just badly designed
- the “desk” was 1m x .5m in size- useless
- there were no powerpoints near the desk – I had to drape my cables across the sink(!) to get to the powerpoint
- the phone was beside the bed and the cable wouldn’t reach the “desk” so you had to grab the second chair and pop the phone on that so you could be at the “desk” while using the phone
- the internet cable was also next to the bed so you had to drape the cable across the room (and across the door) to get the cable to your laptop on the “desk”
- The Internet service was just pathetic. You signed up for 1GB per day for around $23/day but the kicker is that you only get 300MB of that at full speed, after you’ve used the first 300MB they give you the option to either pay 10c a MB for the remaining 700MB that YOU’VE ALREADY PAID FOR, or they slow you down to a speed that resembles dial-up. Absolutely pathetic.
On the plus side the bathroom was large but not terribly well appointed or maintained – it had one of those prefab shower units in the corner.
I don’t normally say don’t stay somewhere, but do yourself a favour and DON’T STAY HERE!!!!