Hotels Ibis Darling Harbour

Great location for Darling Harbour but you are going to pay for it. Ibis is more a economical budget level hotel chain and the rooms are quite small, even smaller bathrooms with showers like an upright coffin. Not worth the price but the location demands it. Hallways hot and smelly. Fixtures old and dated. But everything worked and the staff was was good. On the 10^th floor I had an amazing view of Darling Harbour that could not be beat.

The great thing about brands like Ibis is they are fairly predictable and this is what you get. The room is simple and comfortable enough. Bathroom is basic. Tv in room with complimentary tea and coffee. Parking is available but you pay extra. Great location and easy to get into the CBD or onto the freeway to drive out to the Blue Mountains. I’d happily stay here again.

We stayed at the Ibis Darling Harbour at the end of December 2009. It was in many ways a mixed experience (both in terms of service and quality of the room). To summarize for those of you who do not want the details; good location, clean, reasonably comfortable, decent value but do not expect anything special (neither from the room nor from the staff).
Looking at the location it is however a rather central location at Darling Harbour. It is easily walkable across the bridge to the CBD. There is also easy access to the monorail and the tram (personally I prefer walking but from what I understood it was 2 – 3 stops from the central station). It is however not the best location since it is sort of on the edge of the central parts of the city so while Chinatown and the CBD are close it is a bit further to Circular Quay, Paddington and Kings Cross but it is still a good location.
We had the standard room, with the so called City view. Not an exciting view facing the street but we did not select the hotel based on the view. We had a queen size bad that was reasonable comfortable. The room was equipped with LCD-​TV (not great quality but still ok) with a sufficient number of channels. The standard things were available (iron, water kettle, hair dryer). The bathroom was also ok, no tub but a shower. The overall impression was that everything that should be there was there and it was clean. It could have been less noisy (no noise from the street but from people out in the corridors) Most of the furniture etc felt a bit cheap (as usual at Ibis hotels) but worked as expected.
The service experience was sort of mixed. We arrived early in the morning (7 am) so we did not expect the room to be ready (specifically considering it was such a busy time of the year) but we could check in at once. There were however some other parts of the service that was not as good. They managed to miss handing messages to us (a change in pick-​up time for a tour — we received the message two days later when we checked out) and there was also a general lack of knowledge of rather basic information about Sydney. The personnel at the front desk were never rude although not very friendly either. Cleaning staff were slightly disorganized and showed up at odd times (one day they opened the door at our room around 7.30 am. We should of course have put the ‘do not disturb’-sign up but still did not expect cleaning that early. The day after we got back to our hotel room at 3pm and they still had not been there).