Hotel Indigo Edinburgh - Princes Street by IHG — Hotel in City of Edinburgh

You arrive at a giant staircase and no people, no bellhop or staff to bring your luggage up. There is no bustling lobby, there is a stairway or a lift to go to the reception area. You are greeted by staff sitting behind gigantic computer screens to check in, the young lady who checked us in was very friendly but no information other than a discount for the restaurant was mentioned. We arrived late and unpacked for our 4-night stay, and headed to the Royal Mile. All was well until we were back in the room, and the gurgling of the shower drain started. When you flush or anyone in surrounding rooms does, it starts. We went to the desk, and the staff said a colleague would come soon. One half hour later, I brought a recording of the noise to the desk, and the person was shocked at the noise. So the quest for a new room begins, which fails, because they involve stairs and twisty hallways. I will say the woman helping us gave it a good effort, but ultimately no solution that worked for us other than moving twice. My 83-year-old mom was not up for stairs, so we told her we would deal with it for the night and talk to someone in the morning. In the meantime, I called my son in the US, who is a plumber, and he suggested running the shower water for a while to get rid of trapped air. This does the trick, until the next day. Did I mention that when we do this there is a concerning odor that comes out of the shower drain? The following morning, the housekeeping staff arrive to clean our room as they have been told we are leaving. We got that cleared up and went about our day. Every night, we ran the shower once it started, and the noise would stop until early morning. Our room had a view of construction and a big dumpster full of debris, see photos. Around 2 am every morning, a different dumpster of bottles would get dumped. I booked our room well in advance and would have expected a view of something other than this. The room itself was nice, the bed was comfy, and the hotel is in a great location. But this is not a 4 star hotel and not up to IHG customer service expectations. I read reviews before I booked so this was a very unexpected turn of events for me. I asked a young man who was at a podium in the front hall the third day how to get to the bus station, he did not know and said I should go up to reception and ask there. I am not sure why they have someone occaisonally at this podium, maybe to check for dinner reservations. When we checked out, the two gentleman at the desk were very nice, helped my mom get a taxi, this was our first offer of any sort of assistance, having come from the Great Scotland Yard Hotel in London, where there was staff everywhere asking and checking on folks we were surprised. We were paying more for the Hotel Indigo than any of our other hotels during our various stop overs. When we were checking we asked for luggage storage for a three day tour we were going on, the young lady said yes they could do that, I said we were not coming back to stay but would stop to get the luggage, however when checking the night before we left they said oh no that was a miscommunication. There was no offer to help us figure out what to do with our luggage while on a 3 day tour, no apology for the miscommunication. We called the hotel we would be finishing our stay in, the Kimpton, also an IHG hotel and they graciously said yes. When we checked out I told the man at the desk about the plumbing issue and how to get it to stop temporarily but that someone needed to really check on this room, he was concerned and took my email and said someone would be in touch. I have waited to post this review for that email which has yet to occur. We checked out on May 27th. I really feel like some sort of compensation should have been offered, even as small as luggage storage or a dinner voucher but nothing was ever mentioned again. No one followed up the next day or any day to check on the plumbing. The hotel almost felt like there was no...

Cheerful service staff made the Hotel Indigo a decent tourist hotel. We enjoyed our cocktail hours and dinners at the Juniper Bar and Twenty Princes Restaurant--great service and very good food. These facilities are the differentiating factor in this hotel.

However (with a capital H), be very careful about booking a room that is situated in the back of the hotel. Ours was a King Standard room. These rooms overlook an alley where the trash bins are kept. Late each evening the nearby bars dump their empty wine and beer bottles into a recycle bin. Early every morning the trash trucks, beeping in reverse, stop by to load up the recycled bottles. The crashing of the bottles is very noisy in the room even with the windows closed. So, if you're staying in the rear rooms of the hotel plan for a curtailed night's sleep. And don’t go back into the alley to look at the mess, you won’t like what you see.

The front rooms of the hotel overlook the busy Princes Street, which might also be noisy with the outdoor bars across the street. This would undoubtedly be better than the rear rooms. Be aware that the hotel is very old and not outfitted with the whistles and bells of new hotel renovations. Our room looked nothing like the website pictures. Dim interior lighting, long staircases, older retro furniture were offset by a spacious room and a nicely renovated but poorly-designed bathroom. The lavatory, faucet, and rainfall shower guarantee that you’ll be inadvertently drizzling a lot of water onto the floor and the toilet paper roll.

An added “plus” was that housekeeping was irregular. The bedding, pillows and towels were wonderful, but on two of the five nights of our stay the housekeeping staff didn’t bother to clean our room or replace towels. This was despite our request for daily housekeeping service.

I think there are problems with the management of this hotel. Reading back through a number of of other travel guide ratings, these are not new problems here and they haven’t been resolved. With some competent management effort, interior lighting can be enhanced, housekeeping service can be significantly improved, and working with the rubbish company and neighboring bars the alley noise and cleanliness can be resolved.

The website pictures are very misleading. They do not accurately reflect the room quality that the guest will receive.

All that said, the hotel is in a great location in Edinburgh's New Town. Across the street from the Waverly Station rail hub of Edinburgh. Bus lines and Hop-on-Hop-offs are nearby. Were it not for the noise problem, this tourist hotel would get a...

We recently stayed at the Indigo for 2 nights to celebrate my graduation - something that had taken me 7 years to achieve; and also timed well with being the weekend before starting my new job. Altogether, it was a really exciting weekend to mark a significant occasion.

The hotel itself looks great. The communal areas are well maintained and it’s a really appealing hotel. On face value, our room was also lovely. However, there are definitely some maintenance issues. There was paint peeling on the wall and a number of lights out, there was no heating in the room and my partner also had to unblock the shower drain of hair on our first night. The main issue with the rooms however, is the noise. On the Thursday night, it was just external noise from outside that bothered us. To an extent, given the location, I can understand it and that it’s out of the control of Hotel Indigo - however, I would have expected more measures to be taken to make the room as quiet as possible. On the Friday night, we were disturbed by the music in the bar - to the point where we could hear it word for word. I went to reception to complain, who reluctantly turned it down slightly. However, after midnight the music was still clearly audible from our room so we rang down again.

The breakfast was amazing and the restaurant is beautiful. The staff at breakfast were wonderful and really welcoming. Overall, we were really impressed with the breakfast service.

At checkout, the woman on reception asked about our stay. We were honest and said it hadn’t been great because of the excessive noise. She dismissed this response, at which point my partner mentioned the light bulbs in the room - thinking that housekeeping might not notice them otherwise and, whilst it didn’t disrupt our stay, other guests may not be quite so forgiving. The staff member appeared to take this as a personal insult and continued to present us with a condescending lecture, even after we said multiple times that it hadn’t been an issue. At a moment where the quality of our stay could have been rectified, she instead decided to speak to us like naughty school children.

Being a firm believer in providing companies the opportunity to rectify mistakes before making public comments, I emailed the hotel on our way back from Edinburgh. The response I received as almost insulting - dismissing my other concerns, and actively implying that my judgment about the staff member at check out was wrong and I must have misinterpreted the situation. Overall, I was disgusted with the...