It’s another Fabulous Friday and this week I visited the Holiday Inn Express Berlin City Center West where I was positively surprised about the high quality of their complimentary breakfast.
All Holiday Inn Express Hotels (HIX) offer complimentary breakfast to their guests, however the standard can vary greatly depending on the country and city where you’re staying.
I’m always a bit hesitant when booking these select service hotels and read up on Tripadvisor and general reviews of the property first. I was surprised to see that guests have rated this HIX in Berlin (see their website here) with a solid 4 stars out of 5 on almost every platform I checked which is usually a good sign.
Considering the rate was just above 70 EUR a night I decided I give it a try and see for myself. Mind you, that’s already expensive for a hotel in Berlin as the Intercontinental would have been just about 30 EUR more but I’m really not a fan of that hotel.
In the morning I went to breakfast at 10am and was positively surprised to find a good array of various items such as:
- Bread, Toast and Bread Rolls
- Cold Cuts and Cheese
- Yoghurt and Muesli as well as Cereal
- Hard boiled free range eggs
The quality of all these things was pretty good even though I don’t like the juice being dispensed by a machine.
I usually go to breakfast about 30 Min before closing time as I like to eat late in the morning unless I have thing to do and get up early.
The sign which was set up in the elevator outlined the breakfast hours and even prepared guests for peak times!
Breakfast until 10:30am during weekdays is already decent. Many hotels scale back their breakfast hours to 10am these days (especially in Japan I noticed that fairly recently) but 11:30 during the weekend is very good.
Conclusion
Some hotels go well beyond what the brand standard requires in order to provide good service for their guests. Berlin is very competitive in terms of hotels and I can imagine that management of these branded select service hotels has to shuffle their cards well to compete against non branded, independent 4 Star Hotels that offer a good product. Guests are not staying for points alone.
I’d definitely stay at this Holiday Inn Express again if the price of a paid rate (cash) is right. When using IHG points then you’d have to pay 25,000 IHG Rewards which is the same that the Crowne Plaza 200m away charges and I think that is out of touch on part of the HIX where 15k would be justified considering the chains other hotels in the area (The Intercontinental requires 35k and the Indigo 20k per night).
