Hotel Reykjavík Grand

Good hotel with a cozy lobby. The room was clean, spacious, and quiet. The bed was incredibly soft, you seat and it lowers about 20 cm, so I was worried I would have a bad sleep but it ended up being fine. Location is good. We stood there for two nights at the begging and end of our trip and while the first check in was simple and quick, the second time we got asked for passports and to fill out a bunch of forms so very strange that the process was very different.

Small room. Nice bathroom. Good breakfast buffet. Crummy twin beds. Cheap drapes. ( Could not block the light from the window). TV programming was dated 10 days previous. (?)

I was travelling in a group. We checked in for the first time everything was fine no problem whatsoever. We then went to the Jokulsarlon area for 2 nights and then came back to Reykjavik. The second time we got a room in the older building and I didn’t mind. When I was about take a shower a strong rotten smell came out of the water. We asked for a different room and they said they are fully booked. They said it’s normal for hotels in Iceland to have this smell because of the sulphur from the blue lagoon. The thing is we travelled to other parts of Iceland even the most remote one and none of them had this smell. We tried to explain that we are not used to the smell. After several arguments the lady (apparently she was the Manager on Duty) that attended us she said “If you cannot accept these conditions then maybe you should not be travelling to another country”. WOW! We were so offended by her statement because we have travelled so much, we even went to Greenland during this trip and we never ever got treated like this before. We wrote an email to the in house manager and guess what he defended his colleague. He said she has worked in this hotel for years and no one ever filed a complaint about her. He said the story that he heard was different from what I wrote in the email. We then wrote to the general manager and she was much nicer. She apologized and was willing to hear our side of the story. But still you can tell in email she still kinda sided with her colleague. I read other reviews and apparently a lot of people had the same experience with the smell of the water. So I guess we are not the crazy ones here. If you want to stay in this hotel, please go ahead. I’m not gonna tell people to stay away because the first time we checked in it was fine. Just think twice before you complaint because they don’t take complaints very well. They tend to side with their colleagues and defended each other.