Holiday Inn Express Kowloon East

There’s a green, open-air floor with exercise bikes and rowing machines, handy while waiting for laundry to finish on that same floor. If breakfast is included, you get to eat at the Crown Plaza, which is an added bonus. The building feels new and modern, the staff are friendly, and the rooms are a nice size, clean, well presented, with comfortable beds. Great place.

The location near the MTR station was the main plus for me. The room, especially the bathroom, felt dated. It wasn’t dirty, just nothing special. There was also a constant bad smell from the toilet drain, and it seemed to come from the pipes, so I don’t think it would go away without a major renovation. Getting to the room could be frustrating too. The elevators are shared with the restaurants downstairs, and waiting 10 minutes wasn’t pleasant. Two of the three lifts were meant for hotel floors outside dining hours, but restaurant customers often took the wrong ones and ended up on hotel floors. Even finding the front desk was confusing: it was at the Crowne Plaza next door, and the desk there also served this hotel.

There’s a huge multi-phase shopping center nearby, with a cinema, grocery stores, links to other malls, and connections to the metro. The two main stops farther east also have big malls, though they’re not quite as large. Just keep in mind that the hotel is quite far from the usual tourist sights, so you’ll need to travel often. The breakfast area is a short covered walk across to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, and the selection is decent. There are coin-operated washers and dryers on a semi-open-air relaxation floor. Staff are polite and helpful, and the clean rooms are reasonably spacious for the price, with all the basics I needed. I’m not sure why it’s called an 'Express' rather than a regular Holiday Inn, maybe it’s just technical, since it didn’t feel like it was missing much. The lifts serve the hotel floors and the restaurants connected to the shopping center. They’ve made some changes, but at busy times it still gets too crowded. One lift should be kept for hotel guests unless a key card is used.

The buffet was awful, with barely any choice beyond eggs and tomato. The staff seemed robotic and didn’t serve guests or clear things away, and even the manager was like that. I saw two chefs arguing with each other, which didn’t feel like hotel standard service. The room was in very bad shape too. The toilet was dirty, the TV was old and couldn’t get any channels, the light switch didn’t work, and the hairdryer would shut off by itself when set to a higher level. A very bad experience.