Hotel Riegele, Augsburg **
Sometime late 2010, I stayed in this hotel before, and seem to remember not being very happy with the choice.
This time, I’ve decided to document the stay immediately as a reminder to myself…
The hotel is located straight across from the train station, and subsequently very near our Augsburg offices. So far so good.
It also has a restaurant in the same building (run by the same company) that serves up very high quality German food.
Due to its vicinity to the train station and two very busy roads (that intersection very near the hotel), a room to the front is absolutely not to be recommended unless you are hard of hearing. Even to the back, the road noise is prevalent, mainly due to the ancient, no: antique windows. These are 1950’s style: two separate single-pane windows in separate frames, which are put together in a single unit. Needless to say, they don’t just keep noise out very badly, they are also an insulation nightmare.
The room I’m in is actually quite nice: number 401, top floor, under the roof. The bathroom contains everything you need, but quite clearly in dire need of renovation: tiles are cracked and pitted, the shower is “old-school” (a good 8” off the ground). The entire bathroom is lit by a single lamp above the sink. The grouting and silicon in the shower itself is ill-fitting or missing, which gives it a bit of a yuck-factor. The ultimate disaster in the bathroom has to be the shower tap, however. I personally prefer a thermostatic system, where you give it a temperature with one knob and vary the water volume with the other. While these are still relatively rare, the usual system is one with a ceramic cartridge where you vary volume and temperature by moving a lever up-down and left-right. The one in this bathroom must have been from 1940: just two knobs. One for hot, one for cold. To make things even worse, they opened in opposite directions! Imagine my confusion while desperately trying to make the cold shower warmer without setting it to scaldingly hot!
Also, there are no electrical outlets anywhere near the bed. If you want to charge your smartphone overnight and use it as an alarm, you’ll need to plug it into the outlet at the desk and get set to walk across the room to silence it. Wait: there are no free outlets at the desk! There is a 3-outlet strip floppily laying on top, but all three outlets are used (Refrigerator, TV, Lamp). Out go the fridge and TV to make room for the laptop and mobile phone chargers…
Wifi isn’t free, by the way, but it only costs €2 for 24 hours. Unfortunately, something was wrong with the internet connection when I stayed - while the connection to the hotspot (with a password for the network AND a password for the hotspot!) worked fine, there was nearly no traffic in or out.
Breakfast, included in the roomrate, is okay. Fresh fruit salad, yoghurt, various rolls, meats, cheese, scrambled egg, bacon, etc. Everything is there.
All in all, the room is okay, assuming you can get one to the back of the building in order to keep roadnoise to a minimum. However, the room rate is absolutely too much (€85 with breakfast) for what you get. If they offered the room for, say, €55, then I would come back. For the current rate, I will go elsewhere.
This time, I’ve decided to document the stay immediately as a reminder to myself…
The hotel is located straight across from the train station, and subsequently very near our Augsburg offices. So far so good.
It also has a restaurant in the same building (run by the same company) that serves up very high quality German food.
Due to its vicinity to the train station and two very busy roads (that intersection very near the hotel), a room to the front is absolutely not to be recommended unless you are hard of hearing. Even to the back, the road noise is prevalent, mainly due to the ancient, no: antique windows. These are 1950’s style: two separate single-pane windows in separate frames, which are put together in a single unit. Needless to say, they don’t just keep noise out very badly, they are also an insulation nightmare.
The room I’m in is actually quite nice: number 401, top floor, under the roof. The bathroom contains everything you need, but quite clearly in dire need of renovation: tiles are cracked and pitted, the shower is “old-school” (a good 8” off the ground). The entire bathroom is lit by a single lamp above the sink. The grouting and silicon in the shower itself is ill-fitting or missing, which gives it a bit of a yuck-factor. The ultimate disaster in the bathroom has to be the shower tap, however. I personally prefer a thermostatic system, where you give it a temperature with one knob and vary the water volume with the other. While these are still relatively rare, the usual system is one with a ceramic cartridge where you vary volume and temperature by moving a lever up-down and left-right. The one in this bathroom must have been from 1940: just two knobs. One for hot, one for cold. To make things even worse, they opened in opposite directions! Imagine my confusion while desperately trying to make the cold shower warmer without setting it to scaldingly hot!
Also, there are no electrical outlets anywhere near the bed. If you want to charge your smartphone overnight and use it as an alarm, you’ll need to plug it into the outlet at the desk and get set to walk across the room to silence it. Wait: there are no free outlets at the desk! There is a 3-outlet strip floppily laying on top, but all three outlets are used (Refrigerator, TV, Lamp). Out go the fridge and TV to make room for the laptop and mobile phone chargers…
Wifi isn’t free, by the way, but it only costs €2 for 24 hours. Unfortunately, something was wrong with the internet connection when I stayed - while the connection to the hotspot (with a password for the network AND a password for the hotspot!) worked fine, there was nearly no traffic in or out.
Breakfast, included in the roomrate, is okay. Fresh fruit salad, yoghurt, various rolls, meats, cheese, scrambled egg, bacon, etc. Everything is there.
All in all, the room is okay, assuming you can get one to the back of the building in order to keep roadnoise to a minimum. However, the room rate is absolutely too much (€85 with breakfast) for what you get. If they offered the room for, say, €55, then I would come back. For the current rate, I will go elsewhere.
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