We spent two nights at the Ibis Wellington. Although the room and location was great, there were quite a few hiccups with the reservation itself.

The Good:

The room was very clean, and modern. It was a little cramped, but the use of the space was very smart, so we didn’t really notice the size too much – with just enough room for our Phil and Ted’s Traveler Crib. There was a big LCD on the wall, and the bathroom and bed was very comfortable, impeccably clean, and modern.

The hotel provides free wifi, limited to 15 minutes a day, in the lobby. Fortunately, with the WIFI signal booster we had, we were able to pull in the lobby signal and send out some emails from our room.

The location of the hotel was very good, just a short walk (about 10 minutes) downtown to restaurants.

The Bad, and the UGLY:

We called the central reservations number to make the booking, and got transferred to an Accor call center somewhere in India. The rep could not have been worse informed about the hotel. He was very, very pushy about making the reservation – which made it abundantly clear he was getting a commission for every booking he made. The first mistake was that he failed to reserve parking for us – even though he said he had. This was quite a problem, as the parking was VERY limited (and in very small cramped spots underneath the hotel). Fortunately the hotel made an exception for us and we were able to wedge our car into one of the reserved spots (after about 15 minutes of swearing and both working on it). Parking in downtown Wellington is definitely a challenge, and we would highly recommend taking care of this before you arrive.

The second mistake that the reservation agent made was to mislead us about a crazy promotion the hotel was offereing. On checkin, we had to roll a big fuzzy dice to see what sort of a discount we’d be getting. I rolled a 6, which was supposed to be a free night’s stay. Well, it turned out that the free night’s stay was actually a hotel credit for the value of the night’s stay, since we had prepaid the hotel room. Given that we weren’t spending any money at the hotel (beyond the parking), this didn’t really work out for us. After escalating the issue with various levels of management, we finally got it sorted out, but it was a real hassle and certainly left us with a bad taste in our mouth for the IBIS Wellington. There is clearly a problem with the Accor call center, given that we had problems with the reservation at the Novotel Christchurch, a week later.