Excellent follow-up on front desk service

Fast Check in and Check out

Polite, warm and nice welcome

We stayed for 2 nights in this hotel and the experience was surprisingly good. I did not expect such good standard of service and the rooms are actually better than it seems on the website. The hotel is clean, staff are friendly and helpful - anything you would expect from a five-star hotel service. It is conveniently located near the department store so shopping just down the road. Overall a very nice and comfortable experience.

We booked a 5 day tour around Taiwan and this was the hotel booked for us. We stayed at the Studios, which is next door to the Splendor. They appear to have two separate entrances. The room was large (in our case, it could accommodate 4, but there were only two of us) and had a small kitchen area with hot pot (no microwave). The room was well furnished in a tasteful, modern style. It seems to be quite a favorite of the tour group crowd, so it can get quite noisy in the hallways (although we didn't hear any noise from the adjacent rooms). The elevators are very slow and inadequate for handling all of the tour groups, so plan ahead to allow enough time for checking out. The breakfast (included) was Japanese, Western and Chinese style. A nice selection from each style. The "orange juice" was not real but the coffee was great - a multifunction machine delivering cappuccino, espresso, etc.

The shower fixtures were old and the bed was a little too hard for me. I used the duvet from the second pad as a mattress pad and that made it a little more comfortable.

My wife and I visit her family in Taiwan often. This is the first time we have stayed in Taichung. We had read some very positive reviews of this hotel in a hotel review guide that was sent to us from Taiwan. As a result, we were truly expecting an exceptional hotel and service. This was not what we received.

The hotel itself occupies the upper floors (starting on the 11th floor) of a high rise building admist good shopping and eateries. The first floor lobby is kept immaculately clean....but this is where the cleanliness stops.

The 12th floor main lobby feels cramped with a low ceiling. There are generally quite a few people congregating in this smallish lobby, so you'll have to maneuver around them to get anywhere in the hotel. Smoking is allowed in the lobby, so there is generally a low-hanging fog, as you are making your way up to the room. This is a general problem in the entire hotel. Even when there isn't an active smoky fog in the area, there is always the smell of stale tobacco smoke.

The restaurants are busy, loud and a bit cramped. The breakfast buffet (Olympic Restaurants) were the worst. Too many peopled were cramped into what looked to be folding tables in a large restaurant. The buffet line was not a line at all with hoards of people mobbing different food stations. It had the feel of a refugee camp more than a breakfast buffet in a nice hotel. To "enhance" the morning embiance, loud music echoed about the cavernous room. It was not the peaceful breakfast that we desired before heading out into the bustling city.

The hotel room itself had all the ammenities one would expect from a nice hotel (spacious room, high-speed Internet access, separate tub and shower), but it was far from clean. The carpet was dirty, the corners of the bathroom were dingy with what looked to be the start of mold. The shower and tub clearly had not be thoroughly cleaned in a long while.

Upon checking out, we wanted the bell hop to hold our bags for a couple of hours. It was apparent that this was 1) a very unusual request for them and 2) this was something they were not prepared for. After much discussion in Chinese (my wife is from Taiwan), they finally agreed to hold the bags. Much to our dismay, we later found our bags left out in the open on the first floor lobby. It was clearly not what we had in mind.

We were told by a couple of locals that The Landis hotel in Taichung is much nicer. We'll be trying that one next year.