My wife and I stayed at the Ashling Hotel in August 2019. Overall, it is an excellent but pedestrian hotel well-suited to the needs of tourists and visitors. First, the location is top-notch. It's right on the river and just a few minutes from downtown, the zoo and Pheonix Park, the Temple Bar party district, St Patrick's Cathedral, the Guinness brewery and many other interesting sights. It also is right next to the train and bus station, so transit connections are a snap. From the airport in quiet traffic it's about a 20 minute ride and cost us 30 euros or so. But here's a tip: there is a small park in front of the hotel, and the streets around the hotel all are one-way. The WRONG way. Following the rules (and the signs) you cannot get to the front of the hotel; I was using WAZE and that system looped me all over western Dublin trying to fight our way through the one-way nightmare. However, we learned from a Dublin taxi driver there is a better tactic: simply to ignore the "no turn" signs, make the left-hand turn around the park and pull up to the front door. Wow. Never done that before in a foreign city, but I will henceforth! This is a big hotel, maybe 300+ rooms, in a modern five-story building. Check-in is was a little bit slow simply because there were so many other visitors...My wife and I stayed at the Ashling Hotel in August 2019. Overall, it is an excellent but pedestrian hotel well-suited to the needs of tourists and visitors.

First, the location is top-notch. It's right on the river and just a few minutes from downtown, the zoo and Pheonix Park, the Temple Bar party district, St Patrick's Cathedral, the Guinness brewery and many other interesting sights. It also is right next to the train and bus station, so transit connections are a snap. From the airport in quiet traffic it's about a 20 minute ride and cost us 30 euros or so.

But here's a tip: there is a small park in front of the hotel, and the streets around the hotel all are one-way. The WRONG way. Following the rules (and the signs) you cannot get to the front of the hotel; I was using WAZE and that system looped me all over western Dublin trying to fight our way through the one-way nightmare. However, we learned from a Dublin taxi driver there is a better tactic: simply to ignore the "no turn" signs, make the left-hand turn around the park and pull up to the front door. Wow. Never done that before in a foreign city, but I will henceforth!

This is a big hotel, maybe 300+ rooms, in a modern five-story building. Check-in is was a little bit slow simply because there were so many other visitors in line, but that probably will vary with the day and the season. Don't wait for the bellmen; they're as hard to find as a unicorn. Lug your own bags to the very slow elevators and it will work out fine.

Once upstairs, we found we had been assigned an enormous hotel room, perhaps the biggest hotel room I have ever seen. That was followed by absolutely the biggest bathroom I've ever seen outside of the Ritz-Carlton in Singapore. There was a marvelous shower, the best of the trip. Everything was super-modern, almost Scandinavian spartan in design. Everything was very clean and worked very well. Full disclosure here: I asked at the front desk, and the stack of rooms we were assigned (x72) are a little large and most of the rooms are more normal sizes.

The TV service was excellent, about a zillion channels, it was so nice to have decent TV service with an easy-to-use remote. The WIFI service was decent, downloading at 25.9 Mbps and uploading at 11.3 Mbps which is better than many other hotels.

Heading back down to the public areas, the service in the bar after dinner was very clumsy and slow, really not acceptable. I know they're busy, but it was far too slow and I felt like our little group was ignored by the wait-staff. The breakfast buffet was large but nothing to fancy; it was busy and I was yelled at by one of the waiters, telling me to get on the proper side of the buffet table. How would one know? Oh, well.

Overall, this is a pretty good tourist hotel. The location is efficient but not historic; the rooms are very nice, the service staff bored by the barrage of tourists. I definitely would stay here again.More