Holiday Inn Sydney Potts Point

What is your Priority Club status?
Diamond

Were you (or for multi-stayers are you generally) happy with the hotel/stay?
Yes

Which room did you book and which upgrade did you receive?
Booked Queen Standard, upgraded to King Premium Harbour View.

The Queen room sleeps 3, so I included our child in the booking. However the upgraded room only sleeps 2 and had no possibility for an additional bed.

We are fine with all sharing a King bed, however the hotel did not ask, and other families might not be happy with that (but they do have premium rooms with 2 doubles which could be alternatively be offered as an upgrade).

How are the rooms?
Regular HI room with a large desk, plenty of (AU style) sockets.

Handheld shower head was located very high up and the height of the holder was not adjustable

TV has chromecast, ‘netflix’ (requires signing in to your own account) and ‘youtube’ (which has ads). As the check in system was down due to Cloudstrike outage, the name of the previous guest was shown on the TV.

How is the exec. lounge?
None

What was good and what was bad?
Good
- Nice upgrade
- No card surcharge (cash not accepted, so this complies with the law unlike some other Australian hotels that don't accept cash and still have a card surcharge)
- They offer a kids activity pack on check-in which was actually quite substantial. Families with kids also get a voucher for free ice cream (however it turned out to be very cheap low quality stuff)


- Breakfast had interesting variety of hot dishes including some curry-flavoured mash and rice, several healthier vegetable items too. Sausages were chicken and beef but no pork, though regular bacon was available. Poor quality pastries. Some plates at the buffet had inappropriate serving utensils which were difficult to use.

Bad
- Not really hotel’s fault but we stayed during the Cloudstrike outage and they were unable to program our room keys for the entire stay, therefore we had to be escorted by staff to the room at all times. (Keys produced before the outage continued to work.) While the staff at check-in recognised us, after they changed shift there was a potential security issue as the new staff who hadn’t seen us before just trusted us to state the correct room number.

Value for $ or Priority Club Points? Would you return?
We paid A$176 for 5k bonus points and diamond breakfast, and also received $17 cashback from an affiliate portal which surprisingly paid out only two weeks after the stay.
This was a mattress run so I'd only be staying at this sort of low price and the location is not that convenient for me.