I generally find taxis booked through Uber or BiTaksi to be better and more accountable simply because you have an automatic method to track them down, and they know that, so they can face repercussions for bad actions. Petter........if "access to public transport" is such a big thing, the Conrad is not that far away from the Kabatas, which is now a decent hub for all sorts of transport, in addition, it is pretty close to the ferry docks, you do know that ferries are a major public transport concept in Istanbul, right? The Istanbul Hilton is minutes away from Taksim, which is the closest thing to a full transportation hub in Istanbul.

Again, having restaurant workers and the like try and get your business in a touristy area is par for the course, they are actually not too bad in Turkey compared to many other places in the World, had you spent time in Egypt or Morocco, or India or many other places, you would not think them offensive at all. That being said, unlike some of the places which I just mentioned such behavior is really only accepted in the tourist trap areas, and does not extend to the rest of the city.

Regarding the poor state of noise isolation among almost all of the boutiquey hotels around Sultanahmet (not only the Hilton affiliated Curio). My guess honestly is that when all these guys renovated these properties about 18 years ago, they had certain subsidies and tax credits from teh government for doing so and tried to do everything as cheaply as possible. Probably as they figured that only first time tourists would stay in that neighborhood, that they could therefore cut corners and save some money...............otherwise I really don't know.