Holiday Inn Express Edinburgh Royal Mile

"Great location, room, and the best staff. The free breakfast is a great bonus with hot food and many choices."

"The location is good in some ways but it is key that you understand the relationship between the hotel and surrounding roads. The hotel is on the lower part of the valley next to the Royal Mile. This means that you need to climb relatively steep roads to get to the attractions that appear to be right next to you. We had a bit of a challenging arrival being on the wrong level (we were unable to get a phone signal just when we needed it). The room was clean, a few minor niggles in the bathroom but nothing significant. The breakfast is probably the biggest area of concern but as it is included in the room rate it is a little hard to get too grumpy - the room rate was lower than many nearby that did not include breakfast. However, the food space is too small for the number of rooms when the hotel is full. The coffee machine seemed to be temperamental to say the least and the pancake machine is very popular, at times leading to a lot of people hanging round waiting in a very small area. This congestion, especially as when we were there it was mainly children waiting, meant that there were justles and nudges causing spillages and at least one dropped plate. Supplies seem to be a little random - they had run out of semi skimmed milk on one day with about 90 minutes of breakfast service to go! We were clearly not frustrated enough to go elsewhere, mainly because breakfast is not that important to us, but others may find it disappointing. The majority of staff we met were helpful but the breakfast room is so busy the staff are constantly trying to do a lot of things which did seem to mean that nothing really got finished. The lift is quite slow and a quite small which may be relevant for some - if that is you I would ask for a room on a lower floor to allow for using the stairs instead."

"We stayed here from Friday 20th to Monday 23rd On arrival we were greeted by the receptionist who was very polite , overall we had a good stay with just one small incident which didn’t happen to us but I witnessed a young girl between 8 or 10 accidentally spilt her coco pops not a huge amount but it happened in front of David a breakfast staff member he stared at the spill I told her not to worry about it but David turned around and walked towards the kitchen area and said idiot not very professional the girl looked upset my wife and I told her not to worry go eat your coco pops he will clean it up which she did and which he did really got my back up that"