Nice hotel with terrible staff

Written: 3 december 2014
Travel time: 27 november — 1 december 2014
Your rating of this hotel:
3.0
from 10
Hotel ratings by criteria:
Rooms: 5.0
Service: 2.0
Cleanliness: 6.0
Food: 8.0
Good
- There is a tram stop nearby, but city transport is very expensive, so you need to live within walking distance in Amsterdam
- The breakfast was amazing. Fried eggs, sausages, muesli, cheese-sausage-bread, excellent croissants and a coffee machine.

Badly
- Close to museum square, but walking distance to the center (De Dam).
- Negroes at the reception - a bad symptom. Not only did they not help, they misled us about cheap parking which resulted in a €150 fine. I will describe this in detail at the end of the review.
- The hotel has standard city parking at a cost of 4.41€ per hour or about 30€ per day. Affordable parking is available at the Olympic Stadium, a few tram stops away. As a result, it takes an hour to put or take the car. Read at the end of the review.
- The rooms are very different. The room on the first floor is large, with a wide window and a spacious bathroom. And our friends on the 5th floor had a tiny room with a tiny window at the top, which was hard to even look out.

However, they did not hear the tram.
- WiFi Internet in the rooms and in the lobby is free, but sooo slow! Viber and mail still load somehow, but if you need to plan a route for the day in the morning, leave at least an hour for this. The page opens on average for a minute.

How to park in Amsterdam without getting into big money?
There are cheap P+R or P&R parking in Amsterdam and other major cities in Holland. Its essence is that you leave the car on the outskirts of the city and, at the same time as parking, pay for a ticket for public transport to the center. At the same time, parking costs from €1 to €8 per day, instead of €30-50 per day for parking in regular parking spaces. To get this discount, you need to put in the time and get it right. In short, for this you need to find a special parking lot and leave the car there. Then, in a special machine, buy a ticket for travel in public transport.
Get to the center by public transport. Then, on any other day, return from the center using the same ticket. Pay for parking at another machine, also presenting the used ticket for public transport. I have attached a photo with instructions, where everything is painted in detail.

Despite the seeming simplicity, there are several non-obvious points where it is easy to get money. First, you need to enter the parking lot through the P + R entrance. Although the other two lanes look exactly the same, the machine at the barrier gives out a slightly different ticket, which does not entitle you to a discount. Secondly, when boarding the tram, you must definitely check-in. At the same time, the last check-in (on the way back) should take place in the central part of the city. Only then can you get a discounted rate. By the way, from the Memphis hotel to the central part - 2 tram stops (Museumplein stop).

How the negro at the reception helped me spend 155€ on parking for 3 days!

The black girl at the reception said that she could save money by parking at the Olympic Stadium, but she forgot to say that the parking lot should be called P+R. When asked about the location of the parking lot, she said “To the end of the street and you will see there”, but this is not true (it’s good that the navigator saved it). In addition, the girl claimed that we could take the tram to the parking lot and get off the tram near the hotel.

As you already understood, when I returned after 3 days to pick up the car, the machine asked me for the standard parking price of €50/day without a discount. The interface of the machine is only in Dutch, so I had to contact the staff. The employee explained to me that I had two problems - firstly, I entered through the standard entrance. But this is also not true. To receive a P+R discount on your return trip, you must board the tram in the "Center Zone" and Memphis is not in this zone.
But it would still be fixable, it would just be necessary to pay extra for a round-trip ticket to the center. The main problem was that I, not knowing that the parking lot should be called P + R, entered it through a regular entrance. Regular entry does not entitle you to a discount. As a result, I had to pay at the standard cost of €50/day? 3 days = €150. By the way, parking at the hotel at the most expensive price would cost about €100.
Translated automatically from Russian. View original

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