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UNTUK VERSI BAHASA MELAYU, KLIK SINI

I just realized that I havent’t done the review on the hotel that Mike and I stayed during our short visit to Mexico City last January. Then I got email reminder from Tripadvisor on my hits update. Since Malaysian nowadays are very independent in planning their trip and travel program, so I would like to contribute a little info on this particular hotel that we stayed in Mexico City, in case you guys planning to visit here soon.

We stayed at Fontan Hotel in Reforma area. If you read my previous entry about our trip to Mexico City, you already know what Reforma has to offer.

Fontan Hotel is a local 4 star hotel. But you must understand that 4 star for local hotel isn’t the same with 4 star branded/ chained hotel like Sheraton, Marriott, Best Western, Hilton to name a few.

We stayed here for 8 days and paid USD40++ per day which breakfast is included.

Why we chose Fontan hotel is because of its location. and that’s all. This hotel sit at the best location and has the cheapest price among 4 – 5 star hotel in Reforma area such as Marriott and Hilton. Referring to google map snap shot above, the one that I highlighted in pink are the touristy attraction, a must see places. Yellow one is the center of shopping center, fancy fine dining restaurants, Museums, beautiful old buildings, old cathedrals and so much more. You will spend hours and hours at that yellow area. Below is the distance summary from Fontan Hotel to all must see attraction for those who interested to do walking tour.

Fontan Hotel to:

1) Monument to Revolution 650 meter / 8 minutes walking distance.

2) Palacio Bellas de Artes 800 meter/ 10 minutes walking distance.

3) Av Juarez (Hipster joint)  500 meter /minutes walking distance.

4) Zocalo & Metropolitan Cathederal  1.7km / 21 minutes walking distance.

5) Alameda Central Park 400 meter/ 5 minutes walking distance.

Metro station, Hildago, just sit few meters at the back of this hotel. Night market, morning market, fast food restaurant like Subway, KFC and Carl’s Junior can be seen around here too. It is a lively area, day and night. If in KL, I can say that it similar to Hotel Istana or Renaissance where you can walk to touristy area.

This hotel sit at the best location.

Most of the pictures here taken during the check out. Not during the check in. Actually, during the check in, there were hundreds of luggage at lobby area. From my experience working in travel agency, it must be a big group check out happening at that time.

This hotel has 11 floors and 246 units room in total. But only 2 lifts are available. Just imagine during my check in (where the big group checking out), I had to wait hours to get into the lift. One thing that really pissed me off was, the hotel staff didn’t help us with the lift door at all. He was standing there looking at us with no common sense, while Mike and I struggled with big luggage both in or hands, plus laptop bag and hand carry luggage.

We didn’t expect him to carry our luggage to our room (well, we always got that kind of attentive care and service from every other hotel before) or maybe he had bad experience where, he didn’t get big tip money from the customer after ‘heavy work’. But, I think everybody appreciate if someone could hold the lift/ pressing the button so that the door stay open while we loading our luggage and stuff into the lift. That one experience really makes me mad. Not the hotel management as a whole. But to that guy, who got paid, just to stand at hotel lobby and do nothing.

However, the hotel allowed us to have early check in without extra charges. We reached this hotel around 9 am. We were tired, our back and shoulder were in pain since we flew direct from Kuala Lumpur with 5 hours transit in LA airport. So, when the hotel allows you to check in earlier than standard check in hour (which is at 2pm), it automatically became THE BEST hotel in the world. This hotel do have a plus point in service aspect, masking all the error(s) we might experience during our stay.

The hotel staff has quite limited English vocabulary but we still can understand each other. Fortunately that Mike know a little on Spanish language. So, the situation wasn’t bad at all since hand sign wasn’t required at that time.

There is nothing ‘WOW’ in lobby area. But it is clean. If it’s not because of location, I don’t think this hotel can sell well. The interior arrangement and its furniture is kind of outdated. It won’t serve the best background for those who like to selfie (hotel stay show off).

Our room was at level 7. You will see this set of furniture, served as waiting area, when you step out from the lift. I assume they have this on every level.

Alley to the room

So this is standard room with a king size bed look like.

Outdated furniture with boxed TV. Our pillows is kind of thin 🙁 But the room is clean.

Our view is not the best too. This is what we had to face for 8 days stay. I was dreaming to get the room with city view because it can be awesome at night. But, maybe, that’s the only room is ready and available since we were on early check in. They just had a big group check out at that time and as per hotel standards, all rooms will be available /ready at 2pm. But if you are fussy type, actually you can request to change room after 2pm if you are not happy with your current room. But Mike is a very simple type of person and really didn’t mind with our room situation. Anyway, we got our room 5 hours earlier, so, that was more than what we could asked for.

There was nothing much I can complaint here. All basic items were provided in this room. Toilettries such as shampoo, soap, tooth brush and toilet roll were there. Complimentary mineral water (2 bottles per day), iron and ironing board as well.  Only, we had trouble to communicate with the housekeeping staff since they do not understand English. When Mike was not around, I had to use hand sign, more like, talk to the hand.

Now, let’s talk about breakfast spread. When you stay at local brand hotel, you had to  had an opportunity to try local food. English style breakfast spread is quite limited. They only had bread, fruit jam, butter and eggs. The rest were Mexican food. Fried Taco, sugar coated taco, Quesadilla, Burrito. They labeled each food very well so you will know what’s in it. The spread were so authentic Mexicano, you get rice water mixed with cinnamon powder instead of milk.

I don’t recommended Mexican breakfast for those who on strict diet. It’s all fried, sweet, wheat based and cheesy. I wasn’t into all healthy food and diet also stressed out to eat these foods for 7  days in a row.

There was one day where we got totally ignored by the staff during our breakfast. I don’t know what we did wrong until none of the staff came to our table as usual, asking whether we want coffee or tea. We had to do extra work to get their attention so that we could have our coffee refilled and used plates cleared. I can’t tell whether they are too busy because they attend other customer after us well, but look away when they passed by our table. They also gave us unhappy look every time I called them to our table. But this happen only one morning, if I’m not mistaken it happened on 7th day of our stay. Maybe they had enough seeing our face at their hotel 🙁

We had smooth check out. They helped us with airport transfer arrangement without extra charge. What we have to do is pay directly to the taxi driver. They also let us stored our luggage before we depart since we had our late flight so we choose to walk around the city few hours in between check out and airport departure.

In a scale of 1 – 5, here is my score towards Hotel Fontan Reforma, Mexico:

Value for money : 5/5

Food : 4/5

Staff Service: 3/5

Free Wifi in the room : YES

Overall Experience: 4/5

Would recommend : Yes.

 *This review is also posted on Trip Advisor.

 

Hotel Fontan Reforma, Mexico

Av. Paseo de La Reforma No. 24, Cuauhtémoc, Centro, 06040 Ciudad de México, D.F., Mexico
+52 55 5002 6300

 

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