Parkville Motel

We found this place on a recent road trip to Melbourne and were glad we did. It’s good value, with easy parking, a friendly team and a very smooth check-in and checkout. The city and public transport are close, especially handy if you have a car. You can tell it’s a small family-run business from the care they put into the service. We’ll definitely return.

Very basic and quite old, but well located just outside the city. Our first room had a broken air conditioner, though they moved us to another one. At $125 a night, it’s decent value, and that’s about it.

The sheets were clean, and the room itself was somewhere in the middle of places we’ve stayed. But we barely slept. There was loud swearing and yelling overnight, with people in the next rooms blaring the TV and banging on the wall. Two men were drinking in the car park when we arrived, and we wondered if the motel might be used as a halfway house. We didn’t feel safe, so we wouldn’t recommend staying here. We booked two rooms for May 7.

The tram stop right outside was handy, and it goes straight to the CBD. The room was fine for a concert trip, since we weren’t after anything fancy. The desk staff member seemed lost, though: we were nearly put in a room someone else was already using, then told not to use one of the beds we’d paid for. After checkout, I thought that was all behind us, but about an hour into my drive back to Adelaide, I got several calls in a row about a keycard I’d put in the box they’d directed me to on arrival. Decent location, average rooms, but the service needs a lot of work.