ibis Marrakech Centre Gare — Hotel in Marrakesh Prefecture

Midnight reception was a disaster and chaotic - OH! I'm not the first to write that. Seemed like a slow-motion beginner-amateur hour training situation at the front desk. |Also, the corporate email they sent clearly says amount PAID in advance. It turns out that on arrival the hotel wants to charge all over again. This meant a midnight scramble to access the US Bank's web site to review credit card charges. Boy, I wonder what the fix could be for this? Ya think?||THIS ENTIRE HOTEL LOBBY and ROOM need to BE REMOVED AND REPLACED. In the room light switch keeps turning off all of the lights after 30 seconds. Door key sensor took 10 minutes of fiddling before it finally would unlock to open door. Shower drain clogged. Backlights in mirror are severely dim and flashing! WTF is this? I did use a powerful UV flashlight to check bathroom cleanliness - quite decent! But the mechanical maintenance was last done competently what? 10 years ago? And the room doors in the corridor are not finished with a paint or stain, but with some weird plastic-bag laminated cover material? It must be really cheap if you'd do that. See all the saggy corners and area around knobs. Weird to see doors encased in saggy baggy plastic! No instructions given when handed key about where to find the rooms. Odd script written room number on key - the clerk never SAID the room number, so we had to guess and hope for the best. Fawlty Towers had personality! Not the Ibis Hotel quality I know from many of their other locations including Bangkok and Kiel, DE. ||I'll continue. The shower faucet has hot and cold sides reversed from standard and from markings. Hot when you eventually find it is SCALDING. careful there. Room with two twin beds has about 10 inches of walkable floor space around the 3 remaining sides. VERY TINY ROOM for two small adult beds. Glad the window opens - safety cable disconnected. Darn. ||Oh, and coming off an international flight to Marrakech, you'd expect the Wifi to keep up its pissy silly 2Mbps after 2 AM. BUT NO!! The wifi after 2AM is out, at least til 5. I had to switch over to my mobile phone's tethering where it runs about 10-20Mbps (in US and Europe I regularly see 60-120 Mbps. I just am glad to have anything working. Readining email and accessing web pages for browsing mechanical products works fine at 2mbps. But it literally dropped to 200 bits per second. We're talking 1980 modem speed but for modern web pages. Who wants to wait 15 minutes for a single amazon or linkedin page to load? Or this web site for that matter. Call a 12 year old child...

Stayed here in August. It is a decent place to be fair.

In our experience though, 2 of us got food poisoning because of the breakfast eggs in the hotel. Woke up in the middle of the night, projectile vomiting and continued until the next morning. As I stayed in the bathroom, I could hear a constant flushing of toilets, and eggs weren’t served the next morning. However, I would suggest people to be careful with eating food (especially meat/eggs) here.

Second of all, my sister and I were eating breakfast on one of the first mornings when a member of staff came up to her, wrote a review ON HER PHONE and posted it before giving it back to her. It was funny because the woman only seemed to know French and therefore the review was in French, which neither of us were fluent in. I did speak a bit of French to the woman and she imitated my voice… we thought that was pretty unprofessional (not my French, but my voice). My conclusion would be to watch out for reviews that fill out every criteria option.

There are cats in the hotel. I’m ok as I like cats, but I would like to address this as some may have a problem with that.

There was a problem sometimes with cards opening doors, but I’d put that down to heat affecting how the id in the card worked or whatever.

Check-in is a strangely long process. Maybe this is common in Morocco, but I didn’t understand why they needed so much information from each person staying (passport numbers etc).

Now on to the positive things I can say:

Staff were friendly and hospitable, despite not having a great degree of English. I didn’t have much problem as I know some French. I’d like to shoutout one of the cleaners, who asked if I was ok when I’d been sick.

You can get ice buckets free of charge, and the drinks don’t have to be purchased from the hotel. The staff will fill them for you with the drinks if you ask, and you can take them to your room.

A man behind the bar let us connect to the tv and play music. The little lounge/seating area there is great, you can stay whenever you want. The bar staff in general were actually really nice.

The pool is simple and an ok size, but I reckon it wouldn’t be too great if the hotel was busy. It was relatively quiet when we went.

The hotel is in the centre of Marrakesh and beside a train station/taxi rank. 5 There’s a good selection of restaurants and shops in walking distance...

What a gem of a property in the Accor catalog of accommodation and hospitality! I am a senior, solo, single traveler, and Ibis rooms are just fine with me! The Wi-Fi could be a little bit better, but that's the problem with the vendor and the Internet service Provider, not the Ibis. Although this Ibis would be within their rights to demand better service- in 2023. I came directly from an Ibis in Lisbon, that had fewer items for breakfast, and no Chef for evening dinner! The breakfast is a wonderful mix of Moroccan, Arabic, French foods, but also American/English. Scrambled eggs are made without dairy, but I brought my own gluten-free bread. While they do have a container of Honey, another customer absconded with mine yesterday, and one of the wait staff had retrieve it! I think because mine from Carrefour had a very inviting yellow and red label on it! Three languages are spoken here: Moroccan, Arabic, French. Any word that is too specific can be translated on any of the web sources. Like when I needed to explain that DHL was bringing a package with my gluten-free chocolate chip cookies that Carrefour does not stock! There's been some shuffling of the wait staff in the last few days, but besides being new, quiet, and shy, they are all talented and understand hospitality. The evening dinner is attended to by the top echelon of the hotel staff and everything is more than fine – which in my case means a very plain and simple American taste. Since I don't carry currency, the evening food bill goes on my room tab. Breakfast was part of the booking in the first place, but I don't fully understand what "half-board" means, if that means evening dinner, so I will be inquiring about that. Being next-door to the train station means it's a three minute walk to excellent sight seeing and people watching. And McDonald's if you so care, and at least two mobile phone SIM shops. Carrefour is a 10 minute walk, and there is a shopping mall which is about a 20 minute walk which I will be visiting for recreation purposes and window shopping, to get a feel for the retail culture of this city. And people watching! I did read about the potable water situation on a Moroccan tourism page, and cash versus credit card. The Ibis has plenty of bottled water, and the three places that I have spent money at have all...