Carmelite, Stirling Street, Aberdeen Review

Located in the city-centre of Aberdeen, The Carmelite Hotel is near to the main train and bus stations and handy for public transport as well as amenities.

Outside features the clean and bright Aberdeen granite. Inside it’s a bit different.  As soon as you walk in the front door you are straight into the restaurant/bar with lots of people, food, tables and quirky features like a four-poster bed converted into seating.

It isn’t clear where you check in, we headed towards the bar looking lost.  Thankfully someone spotted us and dealt with us very quickly.  We waded through the numerous afternoon teas and cocktail parties towards our room…

The common areas have a definite hostel feel, the sort of place you’d stay for a couple of night max.

Our door opened to a small room with a big bed. It was smart and modern but not really what we’ve come to term “boutique”.

It had everything we needed tea/coffee, hair dryer, storage and even some ear plugs! Should we be worried? The CASC and Spirit Level pubs were on the same street I suppose, does it get rowdy? There was also meant to be WIFI but the free network didn’t want to extend to our room!And we tried 2 different phones and an iPad. When we enquired at reception we were told just to try again later. It still didn’t work.

So our room was facing onto a quietish street during the day but which had a couple of pubs and after the amount of cocktails we saw being downed in the bar, we wondered if the earplugs were to protect our ears from people within the building rather than outside!

The bathroom was bright and had lots of space for toiletries.  Soap and shower gel were provided.

After our evening out with Christy at Dinner Stories,  we headed back to kip and the bar was still in full swing, but thankfully no noise reached us so the ear plugs stayed in their pouch!

We didn’t take breakfast the following morning, preferring a long lie-in. Check-out was pain-free and the staff had no problem looking after our bags for as long as we wanted so we headed out for brunch (review coming soon!).

We booked our stay through www.amoma.com which cost £83 for the night but didn’t include breakfast.

TL;DR
+ central location (especially if you’re there for a night out)
+ earplugs a good feature (we think?!)
+ staff generally very good…

– …but they couldn’t fix our WIFI problem
– lack of proper reception area so check-in/out takes place in the bar
– not really “boutique”