Review of the Apex International hotel, Edinburgh

The hotel bathtub duck couldn’t float. The head was too big and heavy to balance the rest of the body. Shame because it was very cute but this in a way reflected my experience of the hotel as a whole, starting from the bathroom itself, where I was enjoying a well deserved bath after a long coach journey from London.
The bathroom had a separate shower and bathtub, however the style was very bland: the wall was in fact covered in white tiles, which made the room look more like a hospital than a four star hotel. There was no moveable showerhead in the bath, which meant I had to move to the opposite shower to get rid of the soap on my body. On the plus side, the bathtub was quite deep and comfortable.
Adjacent to the bathtub a huge square mirror was covering most of the wall but there wasn’t much room for toiletries, a couple of little shelves would have done the job. The shower was up to a standard, apart from the glass door that could had been cleaned a bit more in depth.
The bedroom itself was of a reasonable size with a desk, a table and few chairs. There was a mini-bar but no alcoholic drinks in it, just water. The room was a Standard however a DVD player was present along with the flat-screen TV without any foreign channels.
The bedroom had three main faults I could not fail to notice: a stain on the blanket, two unstable boards of the wooden floors that would rise up every time I walked over them, and lastly the noise from the street getting through the closed doors facing the little terrace overlooking the Edinburgh castle.
The Apex International hotel has two restaurants, one on the ground floor and another one, the Heights, on the 5th floor, overlooking the castle. The food at the Heights is refined and well cooked, Scottish cuisine at its best, and it can claim a AA Rosettes certificate. Although the food was good I wasn’t impressed by the restaurant’s atmosphere. The room was a square box with no much decoration or colours, used daily for breakfast, and this in my opinion spoils the restaurant’s appeal to the hotel guests.
The hotel facilities include a gym, a sauna and a rather small swimming pool where an Apex toy duck, much bigger than the one I had in my room, was floating.