Stayed at this hotel for three nights in August, first two nights were booked fully with points, the last night was points plus cash. The points-only rate included breakfast, the points plus cash did not (the guy at the check-in desk re-iterated that). I am silver due to a status match from Hilton gold, so I can only speak for that level...perhaps gold would have gotten breakfast included for all nights. I didn't get charged for breakfast on the final morning, however, because the restaurant manager remembered me from the first two mornings and likely assumed that I had breakfast included for the whole stay, thus not logging the meal. The buffet itself is enormous and includes many Turkish-specific items. The outdoor terrace is quite large (we would eat breakfast around 7am, and it was deserted) and has a fantastic view of the Bosphorus bridge. The room we got was nice and did have a partial view of the river.

Traffic in front of the hotel is indeed very bad from the early evening onward (when heading to the hotel from the southwest) . There were a couple of things to mitigate this if you're trying to get back to the hotel during high traffic: 1.) Get dropped off at the 4 Seasons or Kempinski hotel and walk the rest of the way back. It's very safe and not that far, but that short distance will likely take forever sitting in a car. 2.) Have the taxi go the "back" way. One of the taxis went this way and it was substantially faster. I don't know exactly what roads he took, but if you look at this map (http://goo.gl/maps/lHxWw), we turned left Barbaros Blv instead of continuing straight on Ciragan Cd).

As far as getting from the airport, opted for a pickup by Efendi Travel (http://www.efenditravel.com/) and booked the city tours through them, although by staying in Ortakoy, there was an extra cost to be transported to where the tours start from. For the future, I would maybe stay one night in the Ortakoy area, mostly to go back and try out the baked potato stands, but would stay most of the time in Sultanahmet and be able to walk to most of the places you're likely to tour at.