Grand Hotel (***)

“Aegean Sea magic”

Izmir is a delightful town and the Movenpick Izmir is only a block away from the Aegean Sea. We were here for two nights and enjoyed walking along the seaside promenade taking in the sights in both directions. There is a market area about a kilometre in one direction (near the clock tower) and a ... more

Izmir is a delightful town and the Movenpick Izmir is only a block away from the Aegean Sea. We were here for two nights and enjoyed walking along the seaside promenade taking in the sights in both directions. There is a market area about a kilometre in one direction (near the clock tower) and a restaurant strip about the same distance in the other direction. There are a couple of supermarkets within a block as well and looking over the Aegean Sea is magical. Izmir is also one of the warmer spots in Turkey in March. Our room 415 didn’t have a sea view but was quiet even with the windows open because it was away from the main roads. The room had a queen bed and queen size doona. There's a luggage rest and hanging space, large desk and chair as well as a comfortable arm chair with leg rest/stool and small table. It had a small TV, bar fridge, coffee and tea making facilities. Lighting in the bedroom is three lamps, two bed head reading lights, a desk light and a light in the hanging space. Power points are by each side of the bed and above the desk. The bathroom had a shower over a bath and a decent sized sink with mirror. The hotel WIFI login starts with the option for member login, next you can login with phone number before, at the bottom, the option to login with just room no and surname can be found. Just a note that a mis-capitalization of the surname had to be resolved by reception to allow a future attempts to connect to work. There is an air conditioner / heater in place but, as in common in Turkey, it is a central system which can either heats or cools the whole building so no cooling is available in winter. The double glazed windows can be opened which we needed to do when the heating rocketed up to 31 degrees after we tried to change it from 24 degrees to 21 degrees. We were given a fan, opened the windows and turned the heating off and managed to get the temperature down. It was then we realised it was the same in most Turkish hotels but still don't understand why lowering the thermostat resulted in the such extreme heating here! Lesson learnt. After this, in Turkish hotels we just turned the air conditioner / heater off completely. There was a bar on the 11th level with sea views but we didn’t try it. The buffet restaurant for breakfast had a range of hot foods, cereals, breads, etc and the food was nice. They always had some Turkish specialities and supplied sparkling water and Bircher muesli we hadn’t seen elsewhere. The restaurant had views at ground level so you can people watch.

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