Berjaya Hotel, Singapore

I book this hotel without seeing the actual place for my parents and relatives because I was just too busy. Read a couple of short reviews before booking and just hoped that it was really good as the reviews say -- in actual, it was better than what I had expected! I work in an interior design firm specializing in hospitality projects so more or less I know what to look for and expect within the range of room rates. Great value for money if you're more interested in visiting the locality rather than enjoying the hotel facilities, which frankly is just basic but well done. Kudos to the great staff by the way.

I stayed at the Berjaya Hotel with some colleagues for a conference last week. The hotel is is a beautiful old building right next to Chinatown. Unfortunately things got off to a bad start, because it took over half an hour for three of us to check in. The front-desk person didn't read the Agoda booking confirmation sheet properly, and at first assigned us all 3 of us to one room. When pointed out that I had booked 3 rooms, he took the key off us and spent a long time tapping into the computer and talking to his colleagues. When you arrive at a hotel at 9pm at night, 30 minutes is a long time to spend checking in! When I finally got to my room (a standard room), I found that the shower wasn't working properly - the shower head was very old and clogged up so the water didn't come out properly. After telling the front desk about it the next day, they replaced the shower head at once. My advice would be to let the hotel know at once if something isn't up to scratch, because they don't seem to know if you don't tell them. I had also booked an extra night (via an extra Agoda booking) after our initial stay, in a Deluxe room, which involved a room change. When it came time to change rooms, I was told that the only room left was a twin, when I had explicitly booked a double /king room as my wife was staying with me for that night. We were "upgraded" to a suite room with a "private garden" for the night, with the front desk person repeatedly saying that he was doing us a great favour and that we would be getting a room with a "private garden". The private garden turned out to be a small inner enclosed courtyard with all the rooms on upper floors looking down onto it. The room was really quite shabby for the price. A colleague of mine stayed in a Deluxe double-floor room with a spiral staircase that was much nicer - my advice would be to ask for a double room rather than one of the suites. My other main gripe is the cost of internet access - something like $20 per day, wh

At first site the Berjaya looks great. Anice heritage building on the edge of Chinatown with restaurants and bars close by. I was more than a little dissapointed with the standard of cleanliness. The light grills in the bathroom had years of accumulated filth and the floor looked grubby and stained. I had one major problem with the staff that really shouldn't have been a problem at all. The single internet station that was available was unable to print our boarding cards, not a disaster you would think but the night manager seemed to think that the fact I had used paper was the cause of the problem. In fact there were no drivers for the printer. I tried again later and this time there was no connection, again the manager thought it was my fault, in fact the connection had been disabled by a member of staff. Still not much of a problem , well this turned in to a long saga where said manager was unable to check any flight details on his office PC. The result was we got to the airport 6 hours early. Thank goodness Air Asia sorted it out for us and put us on an earlier flight. Maybe the problem related to one member of staff but I wouldnt stay there again.