Intercontinental Auckland

This is a lovely and exceptionally well-positioned hotel. It sits in a prime spot overlooking the ferry building, within walking distance of great shops, restaurants and activities. The club lounge is very well managed, and we enjoyed chatting with Tillman and other members of the staff. The only negatives worth mentioning are several glaring design flaws with this nearly-new hotel. The large clear glass wall between the bathroom and the bedroom makes for disruptive lighting issues at night (unless you are traveling alone). And the sliding bathroom door that doubles as a closet door is truly odd and cumbersome. Other small issues occurred , such as difficulty disabling the A/C which kept popping ON during our stay. Lots of energy is being wasted here. Also… the club lounge was consistently freezing!! The GM might be advised to regularly spend the night as a guest of his own hotel to weed out these fixable issues. Overall though, this is a marvelous property and we will most certainly recommend it to all but the pickiest of travelers.

Intercontinental Auckland is truly a 5 star hotel with excellent service and great location. The staff are friendly and engaging, right from the time of arriving and handing over the keys to the concierge for valet parking to check in and the entire stay. Could not fault any of the services during our stay. It was really convenient for the EV to be charged while parked with valet. The harbour view room had a great view too. Breakfast selection had great healthy options. This was my third or fourth stay at this hotel and the services have significantly improved from the initial teething challenges, soon after opening. Will be back.

Intercontinental Hotel Auckland, not my five-star hotel Checked on December 2, checked out December 7 This was a long overdue vacations so we decided to go first class. We also wanted the best location, right on the harbour in Auckland. The Intercontinental seemed to tick all boxes so we booked. Good news: 1. Location is perfect for the harbour precinct of Auckland. 2. A great shower with plenty of water pressure. 3. A super helpful concierge. Bad news: 1. Extremely limited storage space. One small three-quarter length hanging space and one drawer. There were two drawers but one was holding a very large black safe so was essentially useless. We left a lot of our clothes in our suitcases. 2. Very dim lighting. My wife found it way too dim to apply makeup in the bathroom. 3. Terrible and very hard to use lighting system. No individual switches, just 3 small touch screen panels with tiny icons. The hotel gave us printed instructions on how to use them saying guests had experienced difficulty. The instructions were printed in a tiny light font so we found the instructions difficult to read. I should mention that I am 80 and my wife 76 so tiny print in light colour is not our favourite. Worse, when you turned the lights off at night the panel went dark. Good luck finding the right icon at night. We tried everything and finally settled on leaving the bathroom mirror lit at night. Try as we may, we could not find a setting that met our needs. Oh, that same little touch panel also controlled the blinds on the window and was used to tell the staff when the room was available to be cleaned. A case of technology over ease of use. Please revert to individual switches, no one needs instructions on how to use them. 4. Awful food and service in the restaurant, the Advieh Restaurant and Bar . We decided to try the beef but the menu was confusing. We asked the waitperson to explain it. She said there was only one beef dish that was a kilogram (2.2 pounds of meat) and it would take one hour to cook. It would also cost $250. We can’t eat 1 kilogram of beef between us and did not want to wait an hour so we selected the chicken dish. We ordered a gin and tonic while we waited for that to be cooked. Imagine our surprise when it arrived on our table a few minutes later. It was pre-cooked and cold so we sent it back. The waitperson brought is back a little while later saying “be careful, it is very hot.” It was not hot; it was just lukewarm and barely edible. We then had to ask for the wine we had ordered because the waitperson had forgot. We ate a little and left about half. A truly terrible meal with terrible service for a very high price. We did not go back to that restaurant again. My recommendation: 1. Do not stay here is you have more than one small bag of clothing 2. Do not stay here if your eyesight is less than 100% 3. Do not stay here is you struggle with tiny touch screens 4. Do not eat at the restaurant.

We stayed for just one night as we were flying out the next day. We ate both dinner and breakfast at the hotel. The food was delicious, fresh and creative, and staff professional and friendly.

Excellent customer service! Friendly and outstanding staff. Manager on site, Ian B was great and he went above and beyond to make my stay and experience the best. Grateful to him and his staff.