Bellevue Hotel, Amsterdam

Author's product rating:   

Value for Money	Good
Quality of Rooms	Excellent
Standard of Service	Good
Quality of Facilities	Good

Advantages:	Location, price, facilities, decor, cleanliness, breakfast
Disadvantages:	Not much storage space, non - superior rooms not so good

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

On leaving the central station you can see the hotel if you look over to the right. In fact, if you take the bridge over the canal on the far right of the station building, as you leave, you almost arrive at the hotel's doorstep once you have crossed the roads. It's a very easy 5-10 minute walk, even with luggage.

The hotel has a small reception area and a small café/restaurant called Brasserij on the ground floor. The reception staff were all pleasant, spoke excellent English, and were most helpful with booking various trips and excursions (even if they didn't seem to know much about the restaurants in the immediate vicinity).

We reserved a non-smoking 'superior' room, which turned out to be room 205, on the front of the hotel with a nice view out to the street, watching the trams go by, or over to the station if you turned your head left.

The room was nicely spacious, with very modern décor. It seems that the hotel was only opened in 2005, so everything still seems new and clean. The air conditioning in our room was very welcome, since it was very warm. There were no coffee facilities or refrigerator, which would have been a very welcome addition, although there was a complimentary bottle of mineral water, with two tumblers, on arrival.

The bed was two singles pushed together, with an individual duvet and pillow on each side. The comfort of beds are always an individual taste, but we found ours to be quite comfortable, if a little soft for our personal preference. Nevertheless, we had three good nights sleep because we were so tired with all the walking we had done each day!

The room décor was modern, mainly white, with a sandy 'mural' on the wall opposite the bed. The ceiling had whitewashed wooden beams to add to the effect.

The flatscreen TV had multiple channels in a variety of languages, including BBC1, BBC2, BBC World and Eurosport amongst others in English.

There was not a great deal of storage space, although enough for the two of us for our three day stay. The room had one unit with a glass door in which to hang clothes, and two open shelves (one of which was rather too high to be useful). There was also shelf space either side of the bed, and a modern white table and two chairs.

Lights were controlled by various switches, and was nicely 'ambient' with light coming from underneath shelves and from behind the mural wall as well as above the bed head.

The room had a small safe in which to keep valuables, and two electricity sockets. It was double glazed, and so we had no complaints about any noise.

The bathroom was spotlessly clean, and starkly modern in design. There was a full bath tub, with shower and curtain, a toilet and a sink in front of a full length mirror. There was only a very small shelf in the bathroom, so not much space to put your toiletries. There was a hairdryer and shaving socket. The bathroom was stocked with the usual range of towelling, and had a shower gel/shampoo dispenser in the bath, and one small bar of soap (renewed daily) at the sink. The toilet was a little too close to the wall and bath edge for my complete comfort, although most other people would have no complaint. It also had full and half-flush options for water conservation.

Breakfast was not included in our room rate, so we were free to eat where we liked. However, the hotel's own café/restaurant (Brasserij) offered a daily buffet breakfast for 10 Euros each. We highly recommend this choice.

The breakfast buffet was superb and included a range of cereals with milk and yoghurt, orange juice, tea, coffee, croissants, various breads/rolls, multiple preserves, plates of cold meats and cheese, and (especially pleasing to us Brits) hot sausages, bacon, scrambled egg, boiled eggs and beans. The staff were all friendly and welcoming. The weather was so nice that we ate at one of the four tables outside on the street for three of our four meals there, and enjoyed watching the world go by. We highly recommend this breakfast buffet, which is available whether you're staying at the hotel or not.

We also ate one of our evening meals here. They do a nice three-course dinner for 23.50 Euros, although we found a 10% discount voucher in our room, which we used.

On our final day we packed and checked out by 10am. Guests can leave their suitcases in a separate, locked, luggage room for as long as they like (free of charge).

Looking at the hotel layout 'map' that was on our room door, we could see that the hotel has a wide range of room sizes. There would only be five or six rooms on each floor that looked out the front of the hotel. Many of the others would only have a window onto a very small central square in the middle of the hotel, the only 'view' from which would be into other people's rooms. Certain other rooms would be smaller than ours, and some only seemed to have a shower rather than full bath.

Our rate was 110 Euros per night for the 'superior' room. Interestingly, this was 20 Euros per night cheaper than we could find on numerous web sites. I therefore recommend that you contact the hotel directly, either by telephone or email, to discuss rates and room options. Standard rooms would be cheaper still, although we were very pleased with our rate for our three nights in August.

All-in-all we would highly recommend the Bellevue Hotel. We would most definitely stay here again if ever we returned to Amsterdam.