My wife and I looked forward to returning to the Palace Hotel after having stayed in one of their ‘comfort’ rooms overlooking Strossmayer Park in October of 2013. The review I wrote at that time was highly laudatory as we were quite pleased with the hotel. Much is still the same at the Palace, but much has changed as well. Sadly, I can no longer recommend it highly; were we to return to Zagreb anytime soon, we would look into a stay at the nearby Esplanade, just a bit more expensive but still retaining some of the old world charm we had found before in the Palace, but which has since been stripped from the ‘comfort’ rooms.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why a hotel would revamp their rooms by taking out the lovely, solid old furnishings and replacing them with much cheaper, plywood-veneer furnishings and closets. An attempt to ‘modernize’? The charm of the hotel rooms has been lost, and somehow our room seemed smaller and much more dysfunctional, although I believe it was the same one we’d occupied in 2013. For example, the desk (which had no drawers) was placed in a position so that when I was sitting at it on the computer, my wife could not get by me to reach the window or her side of the bed—there being no space at all for her to get by. The closet space, also redone, seemed to have been designed very poorly. For example, instead of the closet bar going from left to right, it went from the front to the back of the closet. This meant trying to find clothing by searching back behind other hanging clothes, not easily reachable individually as it would be otherwise. To compound the damage, the hangers were those kind that have rings which cannot be removed from the bar. There is a flange at the bottom you have to fit the ball tip of the hanger into. So when you remove an item, it’s a struggle, and trying to find which little ring is missing its hanger when trying to hang clothes back in place becomes a mini nightmare. The cooling system had also been downgraded, and we were not able to set the room at a comfortable level (my British wife likes cool rooms). A governor had been put in place to prevent the cool temperatures she liked, and it was much less efficient than the old system had been. In the June heat and humidity, we could never dispel the humidity and could not make the room cool for comfortable sleeping. The bathrooms, too, have been remodeled, in a way that makes them less luxurious and less user-friendly than they had been. The make-up mirror my wife had liked in 2013, for example, had inexplicably done away with.
The breakfast at The Palace had been quite wonderful in 2013; it was still very good but it too had fallen off. My wife had very much looked forward to the Croatian štrukli, but when she took a bite of the version currently offered, that was it—one bite—and she began to mourn the loss of a dish she’d loved. The Palace’s štrukli had been featured in their advertising in 2013; I guess it was their chef’s specialty, but obviously that chef is gone and the new one never bothered to learn from him how to make them. It was telling of the service then that once, when the štrukli seemed to have vanished for the morning, my wife inquired of a waitress, who promised to remedy the problem. She came out proudly some minutes later with an entire dish of štrukli that the chef made up solely for my wife. I cannot imagine that level of service today. I would advise breakfasters to get down to the dining room early if they want the best selection of offerings, for I noted that when some of the most popular items are gone, there is simply no effort to replace them. If they’re gone, that’s it for the day. One morning, when the coffee/espresso machine had run out of milk/cream, I asked one of the waitresses to refill it please. It was never done, my request ignored, and there were to be no more lattes, cappuccinos, or macchiatos from that machine for the day. What a change in attitude from 2013!
The drop off in service seems to have radiated to the housekeeping staff as well. On our first full day at the hotel, no maid had come to clean our room by mid-afternoon, so I found one of the housekeeping staff and requested a maid (they were still working, I ascertained). She said she’d tell her supervisor but no one ever came. Later we complained at the front desk and they did send someone to do the room while we were at dinner, but we noted that the sheets had not been straightened out, so to avoid sleeping discomfort we had to do it. The problem with the improperly done bed was repeated for another couple of nights.
There are things that have not changed much. The front desk staff is friendly, the bellhop very congenial, and there is a decent gym with several exercise machines—something well appreciated as it is a relative rarity in Europe. And of course, The Palace is very well situated. If we do return to Zagreb, however, we will not be staying at The Palace. I suspect that The Esplanade retains old world charm coupled with a high level of service—something worth checking out.
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