Hotel Zurigo Downtown

Overall - adequate place for a few nights while visiting town. My extended family stayed around the corner in a seriously over-priced vacation-apartment. This hotel was by far the better option than renting a small apartment somewhere. Great location only a few minutes by foot from the Funicular that runs down from the main train station. Easy to walk to from that funicular station with carry-on bags. I stayed in a single room with a double bed. The room has air conditioning, which is so incredibly important in Lugano in the summer. The room is extremely basic: bed, small desk-like thing, wardrobe, bathroom - serves the purpose of sleeping, which may or may not be all you need. The room is not well insulated from exterior sound. If you do not have ear plugs, be prepared to hear sound in the corridor until all have gone to sleep. Otherwise, very comfortable. I absolutely LOVED that they had a coffee station just down the hall where it was possible to enjoy a coffee before going down for breakfast. Breakfast was standard for Swiss hotel - a few cheeses, meats, yogurt, Birchermüesli, a few different breads, cereals, hard boiled eggs, sth akin to scrambled eggs and bacon in a warming tray, coffee, tea, juices… all perfectly normal and not more or less than one needs.

Location-wise, this hotel is unbeatable. It is directly across Lugano Central Bus station where you can easily take a bus to anywhere in Lugano (From Gandria to Paradiso) and it is just a 3 minutes walk to Manor shopping area or 5 minutes walk to the lake. We were initially booked at another hotel nearby but we chose to change to Hotel Zurigo last minute as we were hoping to have a bigger room (considering our experiences in other hotels leading up to our final destination in Lugano). While it was advertised as 24m2, it definitely felt smaller with limited shelf space to put our 1 large luggage, 1 cabin luggage and the room definitely felt smaller once we placed our baby stroller in. The room was clean, but the bed linens were very old. It definitely can do with new ones for a refreshed look. The housekeeping team was very diligent as we always come back to a made-up room in the afternoon. Service could definitely be warmer. We were not really pleasantly welcomed at the beginning, with the tone of 'we could have cancelled your booking since we were not able to take the full deposit', despite my writing an email ahead with several room requests. Remember to bring the credit card that you used to make the booking as they require it on check-in. They had authorised the card I had used but because I was not able to present it on check-in, I had to use another card, thus essentially having the same amount blocked twice. Another point of annoyance was that we were charged CHF20/night for a baby cot. It is the hotel policy, but it was not written anywhere on their website until we wrote to request.