Have to admit I was too last minute so we can’t get my ideal hotel.
I wanted to book a hotel nearby to the Taipei Main Station but I didn’t do it earlier as mum was constantly updating me on how unwell she felt. So by the time I am confident that she is able to travel with me, my short listed hotel was already full-housed 🙁
After some checking out of reviews, I decide to book the ARK HOTEL. Despite not much review on other local blogs/websites, I realised there are a quite Taiwan blogs that share about the hotel and it built my confidence and expectations for it 🙂
Learnt that the hotel is newly opened only in 2013 3rd Quarter, the location is consider near to the Taipei Metro Dongmen station, which is just within 10 minutes of walk (It can be nearer if you are not walking with elderly or kids who need to take the lift up).
[Important facts especially for those traveling with elderly or kids]
There are 3 MRT station exits which are near to the hotel – Exit 6 being nearest to the hotel, have a long stretch of stairs which I ‘filtered’ as mum will not be able to climb up with her legs; Exit 7, slightly further away compare to Exit 6, unfortunately only have escalator up to the road, but not down, so whenever we need to travel down to the train station, we need to take the Exit 8, which have the lift.
Let’s take a look at the facilities of the hotel rooms:
Mum don’t like the hotel as she think it is ‘not clean’ (seriously, it’s hardly I can do anything to please her, and I am not exactly sure her definition of ‘not clean’ is referring to it’s physical state or spiritually state) but love the friendly and soft spoken staff. The ladies are friendly and always greet you with at least a smile whenever I pass by the small lobby – till the extend that I thought they are the bosses thus they put in extra effort.
I was fine with it most of the time, except the few points that I hope they can improve:
- The table wasn’t wipe on our first house keeping, I saw the food stain left on the table before we left the room for the day in evening (but subsequently I think they did clean up the table). Toothbrushes are replace with complimentary water in the tray so the wrapper are pretty wet (luckily they are waterproof wrapper).
- The last night, despite I put the ‘change bed liner’ note on my bed, we find the bed uncomfortably itchy (was alright for the past few days! Maybe it’s half our fault because I forgot to leave the ‘clean my room’ sign on my door and only verbally inform the housekeeper in late noon so many she ‘anyhow’ clean for us out of rushing).
The first thing when I mentioned to G about the hotel, he sounds excited and tell me: Oh! It’s near Ding Tai Feng! Haha… And yes, we did went to Ding Tai Feng one of the evening for our dinner, will share with you on a later post 🙂
One good thing about the hotel is, yes, they have really a lot of nice food nearby and mum LOVES the food there (yes! finally something she likes!)!!
方舟旅店 (ARK Hotel)
電話 (Telephone)：+886 02-2391-2600
地址 (Address)：100 台北市中正區信義路二段255號
官網 (Website)：http://arkhotel.com.tw/