K+K Palais Hotel - Vienna, Austria     

We stayed at the K+K Palais for one week over Christmas. Here go the positive bits: - The hotel is very well located, within walking distance of anywhere within the Ringstrasse (i.e. Opera, Rathaus, Hofburg etc.). We walked a lot and only had to use the public transport three times (to go to Schoenbrunn palace, or to Mariahilferstrasse to do some shopping or to come back to the hotel after visiting some friends who live farther away). The area around the hotel seems perfectly safe, although it is true that the Viennese do not seem to walk a lot at night (especially during winter) so the approach to the hotel was a bit deserted. But we did not feel insecure in any way and cannot understand some other reviewers' concerns. - The rooms are spotless clean - Breakfast seemed quite appropriate, with nice Danish pastries, cheese, cold cuts, salmon, eggs, sausages, bacon, cereals, plenty of different fruit, different fruit juices and yogurts, different types of bread, butter, marmalade etc. - Good quality bed, a bit on the firm side, but quite nice. - The internet connection was free, of good quality and easy to set up. And now for the not so good: If we can give one piece of advice it is this: stay away from room 105! This was the first room we were given, apparently a very nice room on the first floor, overlooking the entrance to the hotel and the park in Rudoflsplatz. It did have one big flow though: the room's large window is in fact half of a large bay window that goes from the ground floor to the first floor, which means the sound insulation between the ground floor and our room was almost non-existent. It just so happens that directly underneath our room there was the hotel's bar, normally a very quiet spot. Nevertheless, even with as many as a couple of people there having a normal conversation we could still hear them (sometimes well enough to be able to understand what they were saying). Of course, this wasn't such a big problem the first couple of nights, as the bar would normally empty quite early. Everything changed though on Christmas Eve, when our peace and quiet were shattered by a horde of drunk Brits shouting and singing and laughing right underneath our bed! The reception guy was extremely unhelpful with this, as I called several times to try to have those people (animals?) shut up, but it didn't seem to make any difference. I was extremely close to calling the police with my limited German knowledge, as apparently the hotel has no security detail at all. I told the reception we wanted to change rooms in the morning and he said he would leave a message with his colleague in the morning, but he did no such thing. The morning receptionist appeared to be quite amazed that such a thing could happen in their hotel bar, although I find it hard to believe that there were no previous complaints about the noise in that room. So again: stay away from room 105 (as a precaution, I would also avoid rooms 106 and 107, as they are also above the reception area, although not directly above the bar). In the end we moved to the 2nd floor, which was much better in this respect. - Another small issue we had was the lack of English-speaking TV channels. They only have CNN, BBC World and BBC Prime, so after a couple of night spent learning about gardening or how to sell your old junk from the attic at auction, we went out and bought a couple of DVDs which we played on my laptop (good idea to bring one along).