hotel review: Sorell Seefeld, Zurich

It's a basic requirement of hotel rooms, that the room should be dark at night, to allow quality sleep.  Almost no hotels meet this basic requirement, and Sorell Seefeld fails to meet it in three ways:

• a red light from the TV  
• your faithful reviewer covered this with black insulating tape 
• a very bright light, lighting up the room, from the air conditioning control panel  
• your faithful reviewer initially tried taping a hotel card over this, but the light was so bright, it shined through:   
• so your faithful reviewer covered the whole thing in tape:  ,
  
  
  
• light coming from a hole in the door  
• your faithful reviewer put black insulating tape over this: 

It is not possible for a hotel to score more than zero, if there are lights on in the room when it should be dark. 

Some people from marketing had kindly printed some cards and left them lying around, assuring us that "Your sleep is close to our hearts".  Accurately, the woman shown sleeping is depicted sleeping not in the dark, but sleeping contentedly despite bright studio lighting shining in her face:

 

Maybe instead of printing out platitudes, the people from marketing could have  tried the rooms for sleep quality, and noticed the extremely obvious point that the rooms are not dark.

The booking was convenient, working with a call and no card details.  But this was spoiled on checkin, when they requested a credit card as security, even if paying the room in cash at checkin (cash deposit also an option, but then you have to remember to get it back).

Every couple of hours, there was a brief and strong vibration of something in the room.  Think a nespresso machine doing its thing, for one second only.  But the coffee machine was unplugged.  The sound was too brief to locate.

The kettle sometimes overflowed and failed to switch off when boiling, despite the lid being on.  It also pissed water everywhere when being poured.

Over score: -5.