Jouhayna Hotel

I haven’t stayed overnight, but I’ve been to the hotel for events in its ballroom and dealt with the administration as a business contact. My experience with the ballroom a few years ago was amazing. It’s on one of Erbil’s main roads, in what’s called the gold zone. That works well for business travelers, since many company headquarters are within walking distance. The main city park is about a 15-minute walk away. The hotel isn’t very close to either the city center or that park, though. Erbil doesn’t have active public transport, but taxis are relatively cheap. You can get one through Carem or Uber and reach the center in about 10 minutes. It’s also close to the airport. I wouldn’t rate it as the highest or best hotel in town. It’s a 4 star hotel in Erbil, so it could be clean and have good things in the rooms, but still not offer the best service. Breakfast at hotels like this in Erbil can vary, because the city’s food supply chain is new and can easily affect restaurants.

The rooms are clean and nice, the prices are top-notch, and the staff are extremely friendly and helpful. What let the place down for me was the breakfast buffet: the food quality wasn’t great, and the menu was the same every day. The rooms also tend to get very hot, and little seems to be done to fix the central AC unit.

I really wouldn’t repeat this experience. The service felt very unprofessional, the Wi-Fi barely worked, and there was no money to exchange at reception. Breakfast was very cheap, with hardly any choice. We called housekeeping at 8 to ask them to clean our room, but then they claimed we had put up a do not disturb sign when we hadn’t. At 11 pm, while we were asleep, someone knocked on our door to ask why the room hadn’t been cleaned. They say there’s a gym, but it only had four sets of dumbbells and no machines. There was a machine, but it had no cable, so I wouldn’t call it a gym. Such a low-quality hotel. I don’t know how it got such a high rating, and honestly I wouldn’t recommend staying here.

Some rooms are generally fine, and the staff are welcoming, fairly smiley, and good. The hotel is also not far from the airport. I had to switch rooms a few times because some had no view or no windows at all. For this class of hotel, the breakfast is very poor, and the food isn’t always fresh. I rarely saw anyone dining there, likely because the menu choices were poor and there was no atmosphere.