"This is a 'marmite' hotel (UK expression). You are going to love it or hate it and not want to stay here again.
Good things - location, excellent breakfasts with huge varied range of food including for glutenfree, quirky theatrical decor and art, good sized bedroom and comfortable bed.
So all the above should be good enough but here is why we won't stay here again if we come to Oslo:
I asked the hotel if they could arrange a taxi to pick us up at the pier as we arrived on a cruise boat. For some reason this simple request dragged on for days. I would get answers from different people who had not read the earlier correspondence. I had to keep repeating myself in my emails. The reason for this is because there are so many different people on reception every day. We hardly saw the same person twice during the four days we were at the hotel. So the handover is not as good as it needs to be.
When we arrived the receptionist said the hotel was full. There are more than 100 rooms apparently and there was no one to help with baggage. We are seniors with two large cases because of the cruise and there was no one to help us negotiate 5 steps to a corridor on the fifth floor where our room was. There is another complicated way to reach the room when you are not able to carry 23 kg baggage up and down steps but the receptionist did not share that info and we only discovered it when a helpful passing cleaner told us.
We made a mistake when trying to close the safe and it doesn't reset. You have to ask for help from the maintenance man. Another receptionist was working that evening and was too busy to answer our phone calls. By the time we went downstairs to ask for her help, the maintenace man had gone home. In any event the safe is not attached to the wall in the room which means its not that secure.
The next night we came back to the hotel around 7.30 and there was no one on reception. The hotel has a pizza restaurant which is open to the public and with so many different receptionists, the hotel didn't generally feel very secure - if that is important to you.
I had requested a quiet room on my original booking form and again in correspondence. We arrived on a Saturday and there was loud music in the evening. I asked the receptionist how long it would last and she said it would end at 10. It did - for an hour - and then carried on until about 4 am. The drummer was probably very good but was very very loud and I had requested a quiet room and lost a night's sleep.
We asked if we could have a late check out because we had a late flight. The hotel offered us two hours - from 11 to 1 at a price of 20 NK. (We didn't take up the offer).
When we left we asked the hotel to book us a taxi to the airport which they did. They said the airport was 35 - 40 minutes away. But this didn't allow for the rush hour and it actually took us an hour and 15 minutes to get there. Luckily we had allowed plenty of time but not every can do that.
The receptionists - there were so many - but for the most part only one on the reception desk at a time - were generally trying to be helpful but we did not find them experienced or well-trained.
Each of the mattes listed above are only tiny things. But there were too many of them and for that reason we would not recommend this hotel to anyone we know."
