We’ve stayed in some nice hotels: some expensive where you expect them to be flash, and some where the luxury was a surprise. The difference between the expectation and the reality is where delight and disappointment dwell.
When we arrived for an overnight stay at the nhow Rotterdam hotel, my expectation was for a budget experience thinking it was the cheaper brand in the NH family. The rate was too low for a 4 star hotel, I thought. So why choose it? (We pride ourselves here at etrip.tips on more of an upmarket experience after all!)
We were attending a conference just down the road, so the location was perfect, and we’d had a whale of a time in Berlin at the NH Collection Berlin Mitte Friedrichstrasse.
Room
Style is the word that sprang to mind on arrival. We’d made good time on our train down from Amsterdam, so we tried our luck at reception and to our surprise the room was available even though it was before 9am.
With a smile and a wave they checked us in and we made our way past the giant green life-sized statue of a rhinoceros, past the pair of 90s style pinball machines to the bank of elevators which whisked us up to the 20th floor.
We were lucky and had been upgraded to a corner room, so as a result we enjoyed views across the Nieue Maas river and along the Erasmusburg Bridge back towards the city proper. The room itself was sparsely furnished with wooden floors and huge floor to ceiling windows which made the room look bigger than it was.
The bed was a good size and there was also a chair and table available for enjoying a coffee while you stared out the window.
The usual amenities (coffee machine, safe, minibar etc) were discretely tucked away so as to not take up too much room.
The bathroom had nhow-own brand toiletries, the red of the packaging contrasting nicely against the white and black decor.
The coolest part of the bathroom design were the dots on the glass wall separating it from the bedroom: allowing you to see into the bedroom but not the other way around.
We headed straight out to the conference, happy with the room we’d have waiting for us afterwards.
After the conference we popped into the hotel on the way out to the night’s shenanigans to check out the bar.
Elevated above the river, the bar featured an outdoor deck with spectacular views.
The seating outside was already full of people enjoying the sunshine and we could tell that it would only get more crammed as the night fell.
On the way back to the entrance we took in the wildlife motifs in the restaurant – little statues of monkeys holding lights. Quirky.
And so that was the nhow Rotterdam hotel.
Pros and Cons
Pros
|
Cons
|
Would I Return?
If I was based on the south bank of the river in Rotterdam it would be the perfect spot. The nhow Rotterdam hotel is also close to a metro station so if you wanted to stay away from the centre of town to save some money, it doesn’t take very long at all to get anywhere where you want to go.
