Ion City Hotel — Hotel in Reykjavik

Very torn about the low review, the rooms themselves are quite beautiful and well designed, we stayed twice, once in the back side on the second floor (regular room) and once in the ocean facing penthouse.

The Good : rooms are nice, high design, have large windows, and nice “wet rooms” for the bathtubs, toilet, shower and sink, in the small rooms these close off completely. The hotel is centrally located. The penthouse room has a wet/dry sauna in the bathroom and it’s very nice. A large bathtub as well with nice bath salts.

The Bad : its a real crap shoot with the front desk staff. Some are very nice and helpful, others are very rude, snotty and unhelpful. The hotel STINKS! The bathrooms and the water all small strongly of sulphur (I thought this was all hotels, but it isn’t, others have better filtration/pipes/whatever.) the lower floor room would smell like sewage each night and the upper floor room smelled like fried food from the exhaust fans from the restaurant which were located right outside the emergency exit. The elevator smells like microwaved fish 24 hours a day. The low rooms is stuffy and you have to open the window to get a breeze. Unfortunately this opens it to a bar patio that has loud drunk people and bad music until 10-12 at night depending on the day of the week. All the toilets are too high, I’m 6 feet tall and my toes would barely touch the floor, my wife is 5’3” and her feet would just dangle. Very odd. The penthouse room had a loud exhaust fan right by the bedroom that came on around 6pm and didn’t go off till after midnight. It was loud enough that We thought that it was a generator at first. Front desk pretended to not know what it was even though it went on every night. We like to watch tv at night before bed and this hotel has like 3 stations on English and 2 in Icelandic, all seemed to go off at 11pm. The window (which you need because the hotel stinks and there is no A/C or fans. Open sideways rather than downwards like most windows in Iceland. Which means if it’s raining like it was during our stay you can’t open them or risk getting water on the curtains, floor and walls. So your stuck with a hot stinky stuffy room. We woke up sweating multiple times during our...

We had an overall disappointing stay at ion city, despite high hopes and price tag. Arrival was fairly easy although the entrance is very tucked away, luckily our taxi driver pointed us in the right direction (be aware that the street is pedestrian and cycles only). We received a welcome drink which was nice, but that was pretty much where the welcoming atmosphere and experience ended for us.

The room itself was okay but lacking some amenities, there wasn’t really anything you wouldn’t get in a cheaper hotel other than nespresso machine accompanied by pods that had no description on. It was underwhelming for the price, but fine. Not far off a premier inn to be honest.

That was until the evening hit.

The hotel is VERY close to a bar that is open until 3am and has live music every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And it is LOUD. The noise wasn’t helped by the fact that our window was broken and had a large gap in the bottom corner between the window and the frame. The hotel offered us earplugs and moved us to another room the next day (luckily our two remaining nights fell on the few days when the there isn’t a band next door, I’d be surprised if any room was free from noise on the live music nights) but the receptionist denied the window was broken (you could literally feel the wind coming through and see light!) and generally made us feel like we’d been a huge inconvenience for complaining for the rest of our stay.

We also asked for help booking a taxi and were told “just call one”.

Although the location is handy for getting around, it’s also the hotel’s downfall due to the noise. Reykjavik is a fairly small place, so it’s not essential to stay on the main pedestrian street, next time we’ll go a few streets out to a...

This was our second time at this hotel. We also stayed here in 2018 on our first trip to Iceland. Since then, the hotel has deteriorated considerably. Here were the issues and note that we have ambassador status at Bonvoy so if this is happening to us, then imagine the disaster for other guests:

no lotion in room; upon request, they said they will try to find some; they ended giving us a shot glass filled with lotion (thank you to the lady at the front desk for finding some, I know you tried your best and its a management issue) the hardest toilet paper I have ever been given no welcome as a bonvoy member, no mention of loyalty at check in, no gift, no amenity, basically, zero benefit no umbrellas (the theme of the hotel is when you ask for something, they will not have it) most hotels provide bonvoy members (and even non members) with water, this hotel provided one bottle of 250 ML sparkling. I asked for flat, they delivered another sparkling the parking lot behind the hotel closed; you will have to find street parking and deal with the confusing parking laws of he city (where you can park, when, when pay applies etc); the front desk staff was clueless about parking regulations when I asked what the different color curbs meant -the gym is poorly equipped; they provide "water" in a communal uncovered carafe with things floating in it and glass wear, very unsanitary early check out time and even though our ambassador arranged late check out, it was not honored by the hotel and they were rushing us out by 11AM. Later, they blamed poor communication for the error

All in all, this was by far the worst hotel of our trip, ad next time, if you want a Bonvoy property, I would suggest you check out...