Arden Park Hotel

We stayed for one night and customer service was excellent. Room was very neat and has a very good view of the blue mosque. Did not try the breakfast. Hotel could try and co-operate with other hotels in the area and provide a free shuttle service to the airport or shuttle services in other areas as a point of improvement. Overall customer service makes the hotel better and the location is fantastic!

Loved our stay here! Perfect location in the heart of the Historic Sultanahmet District. Lovely room, great bar, nice breakfast (included with room rate) at a bargain at that! Will stay here again on any future visits!

We stayed at the Arden Park Hotel for a week in September 2015 and, overall, we think that it is an okay-to-good budget hotel in a fantastic location. We arrived in the late morning, and the hotel was able to accommodate an early check-in for us. Check in was easy but a bit long, as the front desk attendant made a soft sell of day tours and dinner Bosphorus cruises that could be booked through the hotel. It felt like he was obliged to do this, but thankfully there was very little sales pressure. We aren't the type to join a tour group, but I could see how this would be helpful if you did want to go on an organized tour and hadn't booked anything yet. The map he gave us of Istanbul was very helpful (much better than the map available at the tourist information centre) and became our go-to map for getting around. We were given a choice of staying in either a standard Double room or a Deluxe Double Room, which was very nice. While we liked the modern styling of the standard room better, we ended up choosing the Deluxe Double Room because it was slightly larger and was ready immediately (we would have had to wait another ~30 mins for the standard Double room to be cleaned). We were pleased to see that both the standard and Deluxe rooms look exactly like the photos on their website. The rooms are quite small - similar in size to hotels we've stayed at in Tokyo and Hong Kong. (for example, to work at the desk, you sat at the end of the bed; there wasn't room for a separate chair). We were very impressed with the selection available at the included breakfast buffet, and ate breakfast there everyday. As other reviews have indicated, both the breakfast and rooftop terrace bar/restaurant are in the Arden City Hotel (2 doors down from the Arden Park Hotel). The buffet was quite extensive, and offered a variety of toast, breads, cheeses, fresh fruit and vegetables, hot dishes, cereal, yogurt, fresh honeycomb, desserts, juice and coffee as well as made-to-order omelettes. The best thing about the hotel, in our opinion, is its location. It is a ~2 minute walk to the Basilica Cistern, a ~5 minute walk to the Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque and the Sultanahmet Tram Station and ~10-15 minute walk to the Grand Bazaar and Topkapi Palace. We actually had an unobstructed view of the Hagia Sophia when we stuck our head out of the window of our hotel room. There were some negatives to our stay. The room does have air conditioning; however, we had to turn the fan settings as high as they would go and use the turbo function to get the room to cool down. The washrooms were cleaned and the bed was made daily, but we noticed that the glasses in the room were never washed or replaced and the sheets were not changed daily. When they did change the sheets, we went from having just a light blanket to only having a sheet. Partway through our stay, the keyless lock on the door stopped working, and it took two staff members multiple attempts to troubleshoot and identify why we were not able to open the door. We were given a physical key to access our room, and thankfully the hotel repaired the door lock the next day. Overall, the hotel more than met our expectations, and worked fantastically for our purposes and, considering the much higher costs of nearby hotels, we would stay here again.