I've already detailed the adventures with reward reservations at some of these, over in the
Award redemptions - miscellaneous thread.
I've also already done about as much review as I can of the Clarion Collection Hotel Havnekontoret in the Bryggen area of Bergen, over in post 15 of the
One room suite: $2900 or 16K points?? thread.
(So much focus on points, because in Norway you can redeem points, but you can't earn points, and thus for Choice points collectors Choice hotels in Norway are of much more interest in terms of redemption than in terms of paying with money.
)
Quality Hotel & Resort Voeringfoss in Eidfjord was my favorite one. I got a room with a balcony looking out over the fjord. (The one of my four mornings, it only lookied out onto a giant cruise ship, as the hotel is right next to the cruise dock!) Staff was super friendly. Nice (but very expensive, like all food in Norway) dinner buffet at the restaurant (and very good menu dishes too). Everything worked fine. There was no alarm clock, though, and no "wake up" feature on the TV. (I presume the hotel could give you a wake-up call; I didn't really need one so I didn't ask.) Next to the restaurant there's a "piano bar", and the piano is a cheesy electric one but no big issue. The one problem I had was that one night they had a birthday party in that "piano bar" in the evening, and they replaced the one piano with a very loud country band! The sound was leaking up into half of the second floor (where I was) and it went on until midnight, and despite my requests they weren't able to get the band to lower the volume signficantly.
Clarion Hotel Stavanger was fine but a but too "businessy". I heard that 80%+ of the people who stay there are in the oil industry or related industries. The first night I checked in really late, and only room service sandwiches were available. I looked all over the menu and saw no service fee, and assumed it was included (the way taxes and tips are included in restaurants there), and so I ordered. It was a "barely edible" sandwich of salmon and scrambled eggs!!!
At checkout a few days later, they billed me a service fee, which was more than the cost of the food itself! I spent a number of minutes arguing it, finally got a key to go back up into the room and get the menu. When I got back to the front desk, the clerk told me they'd removed the service fee in the meantime. And I showed them the menu, where you had to lift up a page (that didn't seem like it was meant to be lifted up) to find the "hidden" mention of the service fee. ... In general, the restaurant stuff is confusing, they tell you the restaurant is on the third floor but unless you're a large group you can't use it and you have to use the "bar" on the second floor! Then the menu changes every few hours, including a menu that comes into effect at 10 pm and then disappears at 11 pm!!!
(I was eating in the restaurant so much in part because this part of my stay was hit with yucky weather, and it was a long walk in the rain with 40mph wind gusty (which made my umbrella useless) to any restaurants, even though it wasn't that long a walk to the area with restaurants when the weather was better.) So if I had to stay in Stavanger again in bad weather, I might consider the Comfort Inn instead (it's a lot closer to restaurants).
The Clarion Hotel Bergen Airport was an experience. The hotel should be an Indigo or something, I don't know, but they tried "too hard" to be "hip". The key locks are cards that you wave in front of the door, rather than inserting into a slot. Theoretically nice, but I had to hold it a couple seconds in front of one specific place on the door to get it to work. The shower heads are cylindrical (with nozzles on one side of the cylinder), which looks super cool, but which doesn't give as good a shower as a conventional round shower head. Instead of a lowered sink, there was a (permanently attached) wash basin on top of the counter. Again, looks super cool, but doesn't "work" as well as a conventional sink because of the shape and stuff. Amenities were nice though (the only hotel of the bunch that gave me real soap and real shampoo, all the others had the typical European combo shower gel dispenser junk). Too bad the water temperature in the shower changed every few seconds from almost too hot to slightly cool, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth!!!
The restaurant had really weird food, like for example the only salad available was a giant one with more string beans than anything else. Even the breakfast buffet offerings were quite different than at the other hotels, as if the whole restaurant assumes that people eating there are mostly from other countries and want food mostly from other countries.