Novotel Melbourne, part of the Accor Hotels is located at 270 Collins Street in Melbourne. It is in a good location, in the middle of the Melbourne CBD, walking distance to Flinders Station, Federation Square, Chinatown and Bourke Street Mall. There’s trams stops at its door step that will connect you to many other parts of Melbourne.

The hotel lobby is on the 3rd floor so you have to take a lift from the street entrance to where reception, lobby bar and restaurant are located.  After checking in you will take a different lift to the rooms. The hotel is non-smoking which is great, it has 1 bar and 1 restaurant called the Lane Restaurant which serves breakfast, lunch and dinner as well. This is the same place that serves your in-room dining so you will find the menu almost identical. There is a gym and pool but i wouldn’t recommend it at all. The gym is really tiny and hot (seems to be poor ventilation) and the pool is small as well.

I stayed in this hotel a few times now for work and I feel this should only be a 3 star hotel, maybe 3.5 star but definitely not a 4.5 star as the website claim to be. The hotel claims to have 5 types of rooms – Standard, Deluxe, Junior Suite, Family room and Accessible room but it is actually just 1 type with different bedding configuration in my opinion. There only 2 rooms with a bathtub and it is the Deluxe Spa room. The Deluxe room is very spacious, comes with a sofa , long working desk, LCD TV, kettle, stocked mini-bar, safe, ironing board, shower and very basic amenities.  Internet is free if you are an Accor member. Its $250AUD per night for my stay not including breakfast.

The pros:

• Location is good
• Deluxe room is spacious and clean
• Housekeeping is good (they never throw anything away unless you put it in the bin) and new bathroom amenities are provided whether you had used up yesterday’s or not.
• Pillow Menu
• Long working desk – gives me plenty of space to put stuff and still work at the table
• The bed faces the TV (very often in hotels you have TVs either on your right or left side of the bed)
• Aircon temperature can be controlled and it doesn’t kick in and out on its own. Plus it’s not noisy.

The cons:

• Room Service is very slow. Allow yourself an average of 40mins for food orders and at least 30mins if you want anything from reception or housekeeping.
• Very limited TV channels – mostly local channels and some of them don’t even work. No Asian TV channels for Asian tourists. The TV remote is also very poor. You can’t manually insert the channel number you want and the only way is to manually scroll up/down through all channels to get to the one you want.
• No slippers provided which will be a downside for our Japanese tourists.
• For a for a 4.5 star hotel there isn’t any body lotion and choice of coffee is instant dried Nescafe

If you accept the cons I had listed above, this is actually a very decent hotel to stay with.