Ibis Centrum Kathedraal

Decent hotel in an amazing location. Smallish rooms but lacking a fridge or tea and coffee. The fridge was a necessity as was in the high 30s so cold drinks were essential. Other than that the hotel was OK. Breakfast was good, but oh how I missed having a fridge.

Stayed at this hotel for the purpose of viewing the Ghent Alterpiece. The hotel is literally next door St Baaf's Cathedral. Comfortable beds and one of the best hotel included breakfast ever. Highly recommended.

Let's start with something unequivocally positive: the Ibis Gent is located right in the middle of Gent, so it is a very good choice for a visit to Gent in that aspect. The exterior also looks quite good, which is nice. Unfortunately, our stay here was pretty disappointing. While the hotel is located very centrally, from the way Ibis promotes the hotel we had gotten the impression that it is easily reachable by car and that the hotel has ample private parking. Now, to get to the hotel by car is definitely doable especially if you drive through cities occassionally, but (at least when we stayed in the hotel) it turned out the road leading to the parking garage was closed off from at least two directions, and moreover, the parking garage is both small and almost without any signage. Because of all this we ended up just using a nearby parking garage, which is fine, but this was a bit of a bummer. Still, the gentleman at the reception was nice and checking in went very fast, so we put this aside quite easily. As to our room, at first glance it looked fine. It looked like what you'd expect from an Ibis Hotel; nothing posh, not spacious, but decent. Out of our window we had a great view of the St Baafs Kathedraal, which was great. Alas, in several areas the room was rough around the edges. It doesn't really show on the photos I have, but several spots in the bathroom and around the desk area were quite dusty and looked like they had not been cleaned for some time. It did give the impression that just the bed and surrounding area had really been properly cleaned and that everything else had not really been paid enough attention. Biggest problem for us was that the hotel is very, very noisy: especially sounds from the corridor are clearly audible. We stayed for a night and quite early in the morning some kind of construction or repair work was going on in the hotel which was very hard to ignore. Ofcourse, Ibis is not the highest end-brand of hotels, but still, our room was not exactly cheap, and while the location is nice, I don't think we'd necessarily spend the same amount to stay here again.