City Partner Hotel Victoria - Prague, Czech Republic     

reception staff not very friendly.bedspread was covered in dirty stains as was the carpet. the beds were very comfy and the breakfast was not much to talk about. this hotel was a good walk into the town. dont book a taxi from reception you have to pay at reception and it costs a furtune. we booked a taxi on line to pick us up at airport before we went, it saved haggling for a fair price with the taxi drivers. old town very nice.

We stayed at the Hotel Victoria for five nights in June. It’s a pleasant hotel in a quiet area that’s not particularly pretty or touristy, but we always felt fine walking back at night. The room was light, spacious and clean, although fairly basic: bed, chairs, TV, fridge. The bathroom was much larger than the average hotel bathroom, with a nice powerful shower (although no bathtub). I was a bit worried about noise from the street, but at night the room was very quiet. The hotel too is fairly basic – it’s not somewhere to hang around, but when there’s so much to see in Prague, why would you want to hang around in the hotel? Again, it’s very pleasant and very clean. It was obvious that it had been recently renovated, and it was a nice, calm place to come back to at the end of the day. The staff were friendly and helpful, and all spoke excellent English, putting my three words of Czech to shame… Despite not fancying some of the Czech breakfast options (frankfurters and sauerkraut, anyone?), there were always plenty of other choices - cereal, fruit salad, bread, jam pate, cheese, salads, ham, yogurts, apple strudel, hard-boiled eggs. I’m a picky eater, and I found it easy to eat enough so that I didn’t want lunch. The hotels is located a little way out of the centre, but we never needed to take a taxi anywhere, the public transport is all so good and so cheap, and much cleaner than British public transport is. Just down the street (left out of the hotel, just past the football ground) is a tram stop called Husinecka; we never had to wait more than five minutes for the right tram to come along, and numbers 5 and 9 go right into the city centre in five minutes or so. Number 5 goes to Republic Square, which is good for the Old Town and Jewish Quarter, and number 9 goes to Wenceslas Square, as well as Narodni Divadlo (National Theatre) where you can change onto the number 22 tram that goes across the river and up to the castle. After midnight, the night trams 55 and 58 go to Husinecka. The hotel reception sells one-day and three-day tram tickets, which are excellent value (about ?5.20 for the three-day ticket). The restaurant on the corner is pleasant, and hotel residents get a discount; there’s also a Czech pub-restaurant down the street called Restaurace pod Viktorkou, which might be grey on the outside but is very nice inside (it has a great collection of old-fashioned radios ranged round its walls!) and will fill you with excellent goulash and beer for a trifling amount. All in all, I thought that the Hotel Victoria was excellent value for money, I highly recommend it.