Grand Hotel — Hotel in North Island

I had an unsatisfactory experience after checking-in in Grand Hotel. After a tiring day of hiking and sightseeing around the town, my partner and i booked a room in the hotel as it is the only available hotel accommodation which is situated in the city center of Whangarei during that time.

We had to check in on a bar counter of a pub of the hotel as their reception seemed to be under renovation. The staff were not accommodating. It was a very plain encounter. I can describe the service which they provide for their hotel guests is just the same on how a person casually buys a beer at a bar.

After securing our keys to our room, we directed our way to the main entrance and climb up the stairs. We booked a standard double room for 90$. I can say their linens were fresh and the rooms were maintained well. The amenities include a bath, shower, heater, electric fan, fridge, tv, internet and coffee and tea. The bed was rather comfy.

Although you get the basic amenities the hotel can offer, but it will still be really hard to sleep at night if you are travelling during summer as they don’t have air conditioning system. On top of that, the pub (which was directly below our room) was open until midnight and you can hear people singing in karaoke and the music was too loud.

P.S. There is no parking site provided by the hotel but their is an adjacent parking lot that charges 2$ from...

Their website clearly states that parking is available. I would have expected the number of parking spaces to be around the same number of rooms they have available. They have something like 30 rooms, but only 3, (Yes, Three) parking spaces in a hard to get into alleyway that is barely wide enough to drive a car down. (You have to reverse out, as there isn't enough room to turn around once in there)

There is a parking lot nearby, but it charges $1.50 per hour, and was full when we arrived, except for 1 parking space which we took and paid for.

So while the rooms are a good price, unless you are lucky and get 1 of the 3 available parking spots, you'll end up shelling out quite a lot more by paying for parking at the nearby lot. If it isn't full that is.

The room itself was in excellent condition, bed was comfortable and very warm even without electric blanket, and since this place is part of a bar, food & drink was easy to get.

Only really giving 2 stars since website is misleading, and should state that extremely limited parking is available. The current description of the parking situation makes it seem like there's a decent amount, but...

For anyone thinking about visiting this hotel, please read my comment.

extremely disappointed. The lady at the front desk did not tell us that there is a karaoke party taking part tonight before we checked in, if she had warned us before hand we would've left straight away. Loud music started playing downstairs at the bar at nine, the bar belongs to the hotel and it was right below the rooms, you could hear the lyrics clearly, there was no sign of stopping at 11, could NOT sleep at all, went down to ask what was going on and what time is the party ending. When we asked, the manager told us the party ends at 2am, they can give us a refund and we can find somewhere else to stay, but at this time of night, there were no where else to stay. She also said she cant do anything about it, basically we just have to deal with it????Can't you at least reduce the volume? If I knew there was going to be a party from 9 to 2 before I would not stay here. NEVER coming to this place ever again, very...