I am still staying at the hotel and will check out tomorrow, july 23.
I travel a lot and stay about 40 days a year at hotels worldwide,
so have a broad view of what to expect from hotels. In particular,
this is my third visit to the far east in the last year or so.
I spend many hours at the tripadvisor website when planning
an international trip, and the reviews at the site are usually
extremely helpful. I have never written a review myself, and am
doing that for the first time here, since this hotel is clearly overrated
at tripadvisor. This is an average hotel, and the reviews at the site
fall short of conveying this clearly. I bet that the people who wrote
the raved reviews on adelphi are yet to see the inside of a good
far east hotel. BTW, prior to staying three nights at adelphi, I stayed
3 nights at the holiday inn --bangkok (on ploenchit, about a mile
from adelphi): the holiday inn is about 30% more expensive and is
an order of magnitude better: it is a real hotel.
o.k. so much for the beginning. here are a few pros for adelphi:
1. good location, if you care for nightlife. good restaurants
(especially middleeast), street shopping (medium bargaining)
and prostitution galore.
2. spacious clean rooms, great shower (no bath at my room),
basic kitchen, large desks, free internet (slow at times, but
works).
here are the cons:
1. do not expect any service, and do not expect the people at the
hotel to know what they are doing (example below).
2. I'll rate the free breakfast as the worst I have eaten at the far
east. breakfast at good hotels in china, korea, singapore and
thailand (and may be other countries) should be an unforgetable
experience. the breakfast here is very limited: one thai dish
(green curry, quite good), no cheese, no sausage, one type of
fresh bread, stale pasteries, reasonable fruits, some veggies, 2 types
of cereal, cooked to order eggs. undrinkable coffee, lousy tea.
that's far below a standard breakfast in europe, and has no
connection with a far eastern breakfast that includes a japanese
stations, chinese station, and western station, and everything
cooked to order, fresh, and a real delight. the breakfast here is
better than the synthetic breakfast at US hotels, but once you are
outside US, you really do not want to remember those breakfasts, right?
3. it looks that many corners were cut when the hotels was build:
the lobby is tiny (and quite smelly), the furniture is of low quality,
the flooring (which I do prefer over carpet) is cheap, and the
deterioration is fast. in a year or two this hotel will be worn out
completely.
altogether, if you just want a simple clean hotel for a good night
sleep, you should find cheaper ones. and if you want a solid
quality hotel, you are not getting it here.
my recommendation: get a bit less for a lot less money,
or get much more for a little more money. this hotel is not
a real deal in and direction you look.
finally, here is my personal story (my review above is not biased
because of it):
the hotel does not serve espresso quality coffee at breakfast
(most good hotels in europe and asia do. all the hotels I have
stayed in in those continents in the last two years do. we are talking about 15-20 locations). for some people, like me,
the ability to drink 2-3 cofffee cups in the morning (and not spend
a fortune for those) is important (I have a jura espresso machine
at home). after one day, I approached the management about
this issue, and the guy was nice and said that I, as a special
case, will get free latter at breakfast. Nice, is not it? at any other
hotel this will be it. But here, the restaurants and the hotel are
owned by two different entities. so the hotel cannot tell the
restaurant what to do! I'll cut the story short, but really: do you
want to stay at a hotel where you cannot trust the employees to
deliver on their promises?
finally, the above represents my personal view. My spouse,
who travels with me has a harsher view on the adelphi (and
she was very satisfied with the holiday inn)










