Holiday Inn Cincinnati Riverfront
What is your IHG Rewards Club status?
Platinum.
Were you (or for multi-stayers are you generally) happy with the hotel/stay?
Not really.
Which room did you book and which upgrade did you receive?
Booked King top floor river view, given King on floor 2 with a view of a wall.
How are the rooms?
Drab 1960s Holiday Inn with a nice TV and everything else long past its prime. Mass overhaul needed.
How is the exec. lounge?
N/A
What was good and what was bad?
Good:
+ Almost all staff are really friendly and helpful
+ $1 trolley each way to Cincinnati (10 minutes) or Newport (20 minutes). It runs every 15 minutes
+ Comfortable bed with nice long pillows, albeit all soft
Bad:
- Sketchy area, only liquor stores and fast food outlets surround the hotel
- Dated facility, 1960s brown wallpaper with a faint musty smell throughout
- Lone Platinum perk is 500 points or one drink for your entire stay. No breakfast or room upgrades here
- Beyond the TV, rooms are in dire need of mass remodeling
- All furnishings showing age
- Ancient bed frame too small for King bed, would flip over if get near edge
- Closet had no door
- Simple desk chair barely rolled
- Ridiculously tight bathroom, door barely cleared tiny toilet
- Toilet designed for a small child, maybe 25cm off ground, seat about to fall off
- No fridge or microwave in room
- No safe (bizarre given sketchy area)
- Room had not been vacuumed in some time
- Housekeeping never serviced room despite being out all day every day. Ended up re-using towels/sheets all week in 110'F heat
- Restaurant/bar shuts down by 10pm (latest). Often they shut out the lights before 9pm
- Laundry room closed first three days of stay; printer off and on
- Mega-slow elevators on their last legs, used stairs all week
Value for $ or IHG Rewards Club Points? Would you return?
At $140+, a poor value for what is an old highway roadstop HI. You are paying for the proximity to downtown Cincinnati. Odd that it is called Cincinnati Riverfront given that it is located in Kentucky away from the river with no view at all.