The good news is that the Illy coffee from the Illy machine in the bedroom is superb. All the rest is bad, and worse. Marriott seems to believe that lots of marble in the bathrooms is the most important ingredient in making a good hotel. They're wrong. The key to running a good hotel is service. And the service at the Hotel Berlin Central District is awful. As usual, my wife and I are traveling for both business and pleasure -- conferences in London and Berlin, a week of tourism in the wilds of Brittany, and a week of seeing friends, visiting art galleries, etc., in Paris. So we are traveling heavy. We need to carry a lot of clothing -- plus the tools for doing business -- multiple laptops, other communications equipment, etc. When we arrived at the hotel, there was absolutely nobody to help us get our stuff from the taxi into the hotel. In fact, during the entire week we were there, there never was anybody in front of the hotel to help anybody with anything -- including when we left. There is no concierge service. We asked the people at the reception desk to help us on a number of concierge-type issues. They were totally untrained to do so. For example, the first night we were there, we asked for recommendations for a restaurant outside the hotel -- within walking distance. We were given a map, with a circle drawn around an area near Potsdamer Platz. We walked there and found a collection of fast-food joints, such as Burger King, and a couple of pizzerias. She might have asked us if that was what we had in mind. It wasn't. On another occasion, I asked for help in finding a pharmacy. It took the lady about 20 minutes to find the name of a pharmacy and to print out a Google map showing Potsdamer Platz, with an arrow showing where the pharmacy was supposed to be. I wandered around the area for a bit, found nothing, and asked a taxi driver who was parked in a queue. He stared at the map, pulled out his cell-phone, plugged in the German word for ”apothecary”, and showed me where it was. The arrow was in the wrong place. On a number of occasions, I tried to call the reception desk from our room. Nobody ever answered the phone -- with one exception. After ten minutes of waiting, somebody picked up the phone -- and immediately hung up on me. Once again, the Illy coffee is brilliant. But the first day we were there, we were provided two capsules of regular coffee and two capsules of de-caffinated. My wife and I both like real coffee and lots of it. So we asked the people at reception to tell whomever that we would much prefer getting four capsules of real coffee. We also left a note (in German) for the cleaning crew telling them the same thing. The next day we got two capsules of real coffee and two of decaffeinated. I reminded the lady at reception. The following day, we got two capsules of decafinated and one of real coffee. And things got worse from there. After a couple of days, we ran out of Kleenex tissues in the bath room. I left the
Excellent
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