Holiday Inn and Suites Parramatta Marsden Street (Sydney, Australia)

What is your Priority Club status?
Platinum

Were you (or for multi-stayers are you generally) happy with the hotel/stay?
The hotel mostly met our needs for this trip.

Which room did you book and which upgrade did you receive?
Booked standard room, no upgrade.

How are the rooms?
A bit like the outside of the hotel.



The hotel appears to have been designed with a high standard in mind but the execution has failed. The marble floor is really slippery, especially if you drip even a small amount of water on it, but also somehow attracts a lot of dirt and dust. The windows let a draught in. The air con/heater is slow to respond to changes in the settings.

The King bed is just two singles pushed together. The blanket is not even put in a cover but just between two sheets. I wonder if it ever gets washed.

The cooker and microwave, which was part of the reason we chose this property, worked well. However there was minimal cutlery provided (no knives at all) and the pot and pan were extremely filthy.

The bedside tables are unusable because the lanterns are too big, we had to move them away. The spotlights are positioned awkwardly and shine right into your eyes in the places you are most likely to be within the room.

Outside our window there was a shopping bag and a pair of shoes that must have been thrown from a higher floor.

The bathroom stays very damp and moist, the extractor fan is loud but ineffective. There is nowhere to put your own toiletries in the shower because the cubbyhole is entirely taken up with the fixed bottles, which were slimy.







How is the exec. lounge?
No lounge.

What was good and what was bad?
Good- Not sure what to say other than it was a place to sleep, we were able to cook some food rather than have to eat out all the time, and it was close to the places we needed to go.

Bad-
Check-in - took a photocopy of passport, for no good reason.

Issues with room as mentioned. Also quite noisy from the road, especially from "racers" who've removed the silencers from their cars.

Location, on the top of a hill. To get to the nearby Westfield shopping centre, you have to cross a road twice, but the lights are poorly timed for pedestrians so this takes 3-5 minutes, it's not really safe to run across because it's always green for cars from some direction (ok, the above photo contradicts this, but it took a long wait to capture that moment).

Lots of exhaust fumes from the many large polluting trucks driving along this main highway. Then a very steep walk, difficult to find the Westfield pedestrian entrance though you can walk through the car entrances (past big signs saying no pedestrians). To get to public transport you have to go all the way to the other side of the Westfield.

The hotel parking spaces are tiny and there are only 7 of them, at $25 per night. There is unlimited free parking on one street about 3 minutes walk away, but not always possible to find a space. Other nearby streets allow 2 hours free parking between 8am-6pm Mon-Sat, so you can park continuously from 4pm-10am daily including all day Sunday, usually if you come back after 2 hours there will be a space on the always free street. The hotel has a "drop-off bay" by the car park entrance, which is on a steep slope so you must be very careful when reversing in or out, easy to miss things in your blind spot. Some selfish guests parked overnight in this drop-off bay.

Rate supposedly included breakfast. But reading google reviews it appeared that there isn't really any breakfast to speak of so we just acted as if there was no breakfast. Staff did not explain to us how it was meant to work. The lobby basically consists of 3 small tables. When we went past reception in the mornings, most of the time there were no staff to be seen and certainly no food anywhere. Once I saw someone eating a croissant so the staff must produce them from somewhere, and there is a coffee machine behind the bar which I guess could be used if you can find staff. Reception is not 24 hours.

There is a "minibar" but the items in the fridge did not match up with the items on the menu. Was charged an extra $5 after check out possibly because they thought we took something.


Value for $ or Priority Club Points? Would you return?
A$169 per night (including 1.3% credit card fee in addition to the advertised rate) was a reasonable price but the above issues, not all the fault of the hotel, mean that we would not stay again.