Armenian Street Heritage Hotel — Hotel in George Town

This is my second stay at this hotel with my mother. This time, it's a 10-day stay; we checked out on 1st October. Overall experience is similar to last year. I personally loved staying at this hotel because it is nearer to the many famous spots (example: Ernest Zacharevic's street art) and food establishments in Penang, among them is Nasi Beratur.

The rooms are spacious and comfortable, and so does the bathroom, especially the shower. The bathroom also has a hairdryer, which is good. The LCD TV has some Astro channels (broadcasted from the hotel's decoder) and can play videos from a USB drive, but they used a third-party remote for it, which makes fine-tuning or storing TV channels impossible if there is a problem with the TV channel. Thankfully, one room has the TV's original remote, so I used it to fix a problem with the channels broadcasted on the TV.

This hotel has a one-week access WiFi, where the username and password was provided on a small piece of paper. After one week, you can ask at the reception for a new one. The staffs are friendly and nice, in my opinion, at least. The cafeteria food was OK; there is an Indonesian Muslim lady staff working there who told us that the food is Halal, but what makes the cafeteria didn't get a Halal certification is because of one thing: it served beer. So far, we only had our meal there once, on our 7th day stay at the hotel, mostly because of a thunderstorm raging outside. Normally, we only had our meals outside of the hotel, at Merlin Nasi Kandar or chapati stalls located at Queen Street for example.

Other than the cafeteria, there are two souvenir shops, a shop selling products by ALOR (including durian and jackfruit-flavoured ice-cream) named 'PappaPoor', and my personal favourite, a 24-hour convenience store, where guests can buy drinks, snacks or necessities, even a laundry detergent!

Now for the bad parts of my stay: On my first day of my stay, the 4th floor Twin room (has two Super Single beds) we got, facing Carnavon Street, feels stuffy. Turns out, it was caused by the aircond; the filter was dirty, so we called housekeeping staff to clean it up. Outside of the room, the aircond compressor placed there is noisy, and there is a door inside the room which was thought to be a connecting door to the next room, was actually an access door to the aircond compressor. So, we changed rooms on that same day to a 3rd floor Twin room, facing Acheh Street Mosque.

All seemed to go well, until the bedbugs came. On the third day of my stay, I was about to sleep that night, when I caught and killed what I first believed to be a cockroach nymph. On the morning of the fourth day, my mother complained about an unusual bite mark she got on her hand. Later that night, I caught and killed another 'cockroach nymph' (it was a bedbug); this time, properly identifying it and complained to the reception about it (I even brought the dead bedbug and showed it to the receptionist as proof).

Thankfully, the receptionist attending to my complaint was polite, and acknowledged that it was the hotel's fault, and changed us to a different room that same night, located on 6th floor, also facing Acheh Street Mosque. In fact, it was an upgrade: a Family room with two Queen beds, with no extra charge! From there, it was six days with no bedbugs and no stuffiness. Plus, the aircond in that room is surprisingly cold!

Now, about the written complaints from other guests here: The supposed break-ins are possibly true. Although it didn't happen to us, I noticed two things: one was a number of unusually loud sounds from outside of our room at night, which sounded similar to someone breaking in from the door; the other was a loud slamming of the doors. Not only that, the 6th floor room we got have a problem with the U-shaped door guard. One of the screws securing the door guard at the wall was loose, leaving the door guard with only one screw to secure it. So far, this is the only sign that someone have tried to break into this room before we...

We had an utterly terrible experience with this Hotel and their poor customer service.

LENGTHY REVIEW BUT PLEASE READ BEFORE STAYING.

My elderly parents and I booked this hotel from 19-24th April, Deluxe Family Room, through Agoda and because we had missed our bus to Penang from KL on the 19th, we had Agoda's help to inform the hotel our check-in will be on the 20th, and we added another night through agoda with the total stay of 5 nights (20-25April).

Upon arriving on this hotel on the 20th 11pm, we had to wait 30 minutes for the receptionist to finalize our booking. Received ONE card key for a FAMILY ROOM, asked for another card to which the receptionist replied "Don't have, we only have 1 card. You can just ask us to open the room when you need it".

Please note we did not receive a warm welcome, receptionist looked like the last thing she wants was to be on the desk.

The problem starts here:

We then went to our room on the 4th floor, tried the key to no avail [KEY EXPIRED] was the status, and I had to went back to the receptionist to inform them. To which her response was "Should be able to open, did you try tapping the key?" and then sent a security to escort us and try our key. Please note no attempt was made to try and check whether the key was properly programmed or not.

The security tried our key twice, which did not work, then TAPPED HIS MASTER KEY, opened the door for us saying "There you go, you can use your key for electricity". Of course we complained that OUR KEY was still unusable and he informed us "cannot use key, just ask us to open your room every time".

THIS IS RIDICULOUS!

Back down to the receptionist we went, demanding them to change either the room, or the key, and complained that it is RIDICULOUS to be staying in a HOTEL but does not have a key to open our room, relying on the hotel staff to open the door. I quote the receptionist's rude response "Sir, anyone here can open all the doors. No other room. Why don't you go to your room and use the card for electricity."

Took us a few more angry confrontation until the male supervisor came out, and then only HE apologized and tell us that they were having a problem with their card system, and will need to wait until the next working day to try and fix the cards earliest after 12pm. And he was sorry that they were fully booked for the night with no spare bedrooms to relocate us into.

Do you not train your staff for hospitality and ability to explain properly when there are problems with the system and not treat your guests like they are a nuisance???

After the superior's thorough explanation, we agreed to go back to our room for the night.

BUT we did not feel safe to stay in the hotel, especially with the claim that anyone can open our door.

We CHECKED OUT the next morning, and only stayed for 1 night albeit paying for the whole 6 nights + extra hotel tax.

No attempt was made by the same female receptionist to ask why we are checking out, just "ok, thats all" after checking our room details.

Review on the room :

Door had metal plates holding the door knob together, looked like it had been opened by force once, and was slightly ajar on the lock.

Room : Booked the Deluxe Family Room, but the room we got looked like the normal family room option.

Bed : Nice and Firm

Bathroom : Wash basin pipe was leaking, water was constantly dripping all night long (And we can hear it from the bed) and made the whole bathroom floor wet. Other than that, hot water was working well and water was adequate. Basic amenities was provided.

Soundproofing : Good double glass for sounds from the road, poor to none soundproofing for sounds from within the hotel itself.

Location : Superb location smack in the middle of the old area with loads of food and heritage around.

SUMMARY : We will not be staying in a hotel we do not feel safe to be sleeping in, no matter how good the location was, and their extremely poor...

Summary: Poorly designed rooms in bad condition and mediocre service. Would never stay again.

Check-in: Arrived at hotel at 11:30am and tried our luck to check-in but the receptionist brushed us off by saying check-in time was at 2pm. We understand this policy, but as a hotelier, I understand that it would be more convenient for both parties if we could register first even before check-in. We asked if we could do so, only then did she reluctantly register us.

Security: Left our bags at the reception and went to tour the city. They provided us with a tag to retrieve our bags. When we returned to check-in after 2pm and to retrieve our bags, another guest came and said she lost her tag. The staff simply let her walk in into their office and take her bags without any form of verifying their identification. How safe are our bags actually? They could have just taken ours instead.

Room: There was a pillar in the middle of the room. Curtains were torn and tattered. Bath towel rack was poorly installed and was almost falling apart (safety hazard). Clothes/towel hook was loose and would turn when you hang something (totally defeats its purpose).

Air-conditioning: Emitted warm, musty air which had a very horrible smell of mould on our 2nd night. Room temperature fluctuated between 26 and 27 degrees celcius. Called the reception to inform them. They sent an "engineer" to our room to press buttons on the a/c remote control (which we could do on our own). He said that the a/c is already emitting cool air. I told him it wasn't, he put his hand up to feel and admitted that it really wasn't. Then he said that it would get colder in 15 minutes - it didn't. We called again to request for a room change but they didn't have any other rooms available for us. The reception staff offered us a fan instead. We had no other choice but to accept it. Five minutes later, he came up with a dust-covered fan (at least have the decency to clean it first?). No other form of service recovery was offered for this inconvenience.

Service: On two separate occasions, we approached the reception to request for bath towels and bottled water - they never came. We would have to ask them a second time for these items to...