I stayed at City Lodge for a little over 3 weeks this month, and can attest to the great value this place represents. I did take a look at a few Backpackers' places in the area (including the YMCA, which is right next door) and for the price, this place IS IT. I really can't understand why anyone in their right mind who is looking for a room in the NZ$50-100 range would stay anywhere else.
I found the reception staff (all three of them) to be very friendly and extremely accommodating, and to me this means a lot. Heck, even the housekeeping staff is kind!
The rooms themselves are small, it's true, but you get your own modern bathroom with a roomy medicine cabinet over the sink, plus your own small TV with at least 4 or 5 decent channels. For the price, none of the other places I visited offered these features.
A couple of tips for you now. If you intend to stay at City Lodge more than a couple of days and/or to spend time in your room during the day, ask for one of the rooms with a number ending with a 07 or higher (rooms with numbers ending in 01-06 may be noisy during weekdays over the next few months, as a 5-6 story building is currently under construction on that side of City Lodge). The other thing is that if you need wireless internet and have your own wifi device with you, you'll get the best signal in rooms 211, 407, 408, 611, 807 and 808 (their routers are located in the hallsways close to these rooms). The charge for a wireless Internet access code is NZ$12 for 250MB of data transfer, valid 30 days - to give you an idea, Skype calls (which should be of decent quality, as the speed is quite good) will use roughly 1.5MB a minute. For me, I found that 250MB would last me 2 to 4 days with quite a lot of emailing and voip phone calls (I made it a point not to listen to music or download images/videos while there though).
My room was a "Luxury" Single (not sure it is the term they use for it - it's basically a room for one person, but with a double bed instead of a single bed), and they gave me a weekly rate of NZ$395 (the YMCA next door offered me a small concrete room with a tiny single bed, no TV and a tired-looking shared bathroom for NZ$400 a week!). You can't go wrong with this place.

Booked months in advance -arrived 10pm very tired, told no parking at all, had expensive gifts in vehicle, they couldn't care less. Had to find somewhere else at 11pm and they still charged me a full night. Never go there.

This place is more like a hotel than a hostel but it has all the facilities for backpacker accommodation. Some of the reviews have mentioned small rooms - I have stayed in 4 star hotels with rooms of a similar size in Hong Kong so considering the cost and the location you really can't complain. Very clean and great view of the tower from our room.

I'm actually writing this review to mention that the front desk have a deal with a local taxi company who will take you to the airport for a set price of 35NZD. The bus service is quite a walk away especially if you have luggage and costs 15NZD per person so even for 2 people it makes sense to get a cab. We were leaving at 6:30am and the taxi was waiting for us right outside at 6:20 - we reached the airport in 20 minutes. Just wanted to mention this as it made our lives much easier and costs the same (you would save a lot if there were 3/4 of you). For some reason this isn't advertised and we only found out becasue we were leaving so early and had a lot of luggage.

All in all this is great place with good security in a great location. I would definitely stay here again.

We chose the City Lodge based on reviews on this website and also based on the fact that reviews for just about every other budget hotel in Auckland were terrible!

The staff were incredibly friendly and the room was clean and comfortable. However, it was very small, which suited us fine, but might not be great for anybody with any amount of luggage. The mattress was also very uncomfortable and well past its use by date.

The shower was fantastic - powerful and huge - and we got a TV and full sized fridge in the room plus a view of the Sky Tower. It was very noisy outside from about 6:30am due to building work but as it was summer we were up quite early anyway.

Very basic but great value for money.