City Hotel Meckenheim

Good
Traveller Type: Family with Young Children

Wonderful
Traveller Type: Family with Young Children
  : The room was clean. The staff was polite and the breakfast we super good.
  : Nothing really.

Fair
Traveller Type: Traveling as Couple
  : Although very basic, the room was spacious and clean. It was quiet, as requested. The bed was comfortable. The staff were generally polite and helpful, except for one woman in the breakfast room. She grudgingly delivered our pre-requested lactose-free milk and bananas some days, and more than once she simply grunted when I greeted her with a request for these items. I was told that the problem was that she did not understand my language (English), but, in my opinion, there is still no need to grunt at someone if you do not know what they are saying. Especially when one is there to offer a service to paying guests. I do wonder why people of such a disposition are employed in that kind of work. The breakfast was adequate, with a good range of cold, buffet items on most days, but the hot food was always very limited, with hardly any choice on more than one day. The only whole fresh fruit available was oranges, and there was a machine for obtaining fresh orange juice (a nice touch), but I noted that throughout our stay not one person squeezed the oranges. The fresh fruit salad every morning was very welcome. The location of the hotel suited our purpose for this particular visit, but it was further from the train station in Meckenheim than we had been led to believe. This was not a problem, as we walked the distance easily. However, in the strong wind and heavy rain (and with luggage) it was a different matter. The lack of street lighting for the initial part of the trek did not help. A taxi driver refused to take us from the train station to the hotel, saying it was only 200 metres. It turned out to be over 700 metres. Not the fault of the hotel, obviously, but other guests should be aware of this if they are arriving by train. There are some negative comments in this section, but that is because there was no more room in the section below.
  : Upon our arrival there were several problems with the room: The shower-head in the bathroom was broken, the lavatory roll holder became jammed on its first use, and the coffee-making machine had no milk and only two coffee capsules. We had also asked in advance for tea and a hot water facility, but both of these were absent. For some obscure reason, the lavatory roll holder had a lock on it, so we could not open it to resolve the issue of jammed lavatory paper, which had to be extracted through a tiny opening and thus became easily blocked. I tried to imagine why there was a lock on it. Who would want to steal (inferior quality) lavatory paper? To the credit of the staff, these problems were resolved swiftly. A handyman turned up almost immediately to fix the shower-head, and we were given additional lavatory rolls to last until the following morning, when Housekeeping dealt with the jammed roll holder (which never became jammed again, partly due to our very careful and tentative use of it). Reception supplied us with more coffee and milk, plus tea bags, and endeavoured to find us a kettle, which materialised the next day. At our first breakfast there was no lactose-free milk, which we had also requested in advance. We were told that Soya milk was available as an equivalent substitute, but we know that although Soya milk is lactose-free, it has other qualities that can, as in our case, seriously upset a system that suffers from Crohn's disease. However, the man on duty offered to go out and buy some lactose-free milk straight away, but we said we could manage until the following day, when we would require proper, lactose-free milk. After that, a person always appeared with our lactose-free milk on a tray, along with the fresh fruit (bananas) that we had also requested in advance. One woman who did this, accompanied by a grunt and a look of thunder, should never have been working in such an environment (see above).

Very Good
Traveller Type:
  : Handy location, with public transport options to avoid having to drive everywhere...and away from the bustling/noisy city centres. Good breakfast and comfortable rooms.
  : Hotel's own, and Booking.com's advertised facilities were not up to date, as the bar & restaurant were more or less non-existent. The bar (shown in photos as a room with a bar, chairs, tables, etc.) was now a beer-from-a-fridge in the Reception area. The restaurant (despite claiming opening times from 18:30-22:00 on Wed-Sat on their own website - https://www.city-hotel-meckenheim.de/en/food-beverage) was simply not available at all...other than for breakfast. If this had been noted on the website, we would have booked a different hotel, as the other traveller in our party could not walk far, and thus we had to drive to the local restaurants each evening - which meant no drinking for me. Room lighting could be better, as there is a single ceiling light above the door, and then floor lamps around the room...all with different combinations of light switches to turn on/off...and they didn't illuminate the room very much,

Good
Traveller Type: Traveling as Couple
  : Staff very friendly, nice breakfast. Close to the motorway.
  : The beds are too soft.