This is a hard review to write. 2 nights here. The hotel itself is fine. Tastefully refurbished, with a dose of quirkiness. We had two linked rooms, with a small sitting room and balcony (with a total non-view). Check in was polite and efficient. Breakfast was excellent, with high quality buffet and eggs cooked to order in front of you. Kept running out of fruit juice, however. Replenishment could be better. We were in the mid European heatwave, reaching 37C in the afternoons. When we first entered the rooms, the "aircon" was on at full and incredibly noisy blast, yet the rooms felt very warm. I assumed they've just turned it on prior to our arrival. After a very hot evening out, I was relishing a cool bedroom to sleep in (having left the "aircon" on whilst out). Arriving back, I was dismayed to find my room was 28C. I went down to reception, but the night staff were completely uninterested and unsympathetic. He said "we don't have air conditioning, we have air movement". I said it was utterly useless, and he said that the Swiss government had banned air conditioning. There was nothing he could do. I returned to my room and sweated the night away with no sleep whatsoever. I felt truly terrible in the morning. The morning staff were far more understanding and offered to put fans in the room, which did help but only slightly. This place is not remotely cheap (even for Zurich, where everything is at least 50% more than you would pay anywhere else), and especially the rooms we had. Tripadvisor shows aircon as an amenity for the hotel, and for this price I would simply take it for granted. To say aircon is "banned" is patent rubbish, as we went into dozens of shops, bars, restaurants that were crisply cool. I checked the hotel's main competitors and all have full aircon. I did some research, and it seems the government are indeed making it difficult to put aircon into new builds and refurbs. Seidenhof needs to get lobbying, as these weather events are going to become much more frequent and nobody is going to pay its prices to stay in a hotel with no aircon. This ruined our stay in Zurich. If the Swiss government are serious about the environment, they should tax out of existence the nose-to-tail supercars that clutter Zurich's roads instead of targeting the one thing that makes living with climate change tolerable. Whilst they're at it, they should also ban plastic drinking straws (as in the UK), which do such terrible damage to marine wildlife.
翻譯