Holiday Inn San Juan
My wife and I stayed at this hotel the night before a Caribbean cruise. We took a taxi from the airport, which cost about $17 and took about 20 minutes.
The hotel is located in the "Condado" section of San Juan, not far from Old San Juan (about a 10-minute taxi or bus ride). It is just around the corner from Ashford St., which is the "main drag" with most of the stores, bars and restaurants. In fact, there are several upscale boutiques in this area, such as Cartier and Rolex. You can find just about anything you need within a 10 minute walk of the hotel.
The hotel appears to be fairly new. Check-in was speedy, and there are two elevators to take you to your room. Our room was small but comfortable, with some nice touches like a quilt-top mattress on the queen-sized bed.
There is a bus stop about 2 blocks away from the hotel, on Ashford St. We took the bus into Old San Juan for 75-cents. Bus service in San Juan is not as dependable as it is in the states. Even the front desk staff admitted this, telling us that buses on Saturday "sometimes show up on time, sometimes late, sometimes not at all." And we found out they were right, as we waited for a bus for over 30 minutes past it's scheduled arrival time, and finally gave up and took a taxi (we joked about a conspiracy, where the taxi drivers pay off the bus drivers to skip certain trips so that tourists will be forced to pay for an expensive cab ride.)
Continental breakfast is offered in a breakfast room, which got fairly crowded on Saturday morning but none of the food items ran out, which we've experienced before at other hotels.
After checking out we left our luggage at the hotel while we explored Old San Juan before embarking on our cruise later that day. No attempt to match luggage with its proper owner is made, you just go into the storage room and point out your bags and the staff member brings them out for you. That's a system just begging to be taken advantage of, frankly.
We had wanted to ask the woman at the tourism desk for information about going on the Bacardi distillery tour, but she was too busy talking to someone on her cell phone. We hung around, making it obvious we were waiting for assistance, but after a few minutes of listening to her chatter in Spanish to whomever she was talking, we gave up and just decided to visit Old San Juan again.
Taxis are waiting outside at all times (or at least all times that we saw), so it's easy to get to your ship or the airport, etc. Or save yourself some money and take a gamble on the buses. We took the bus 3 or 4 times while in san Juan, and we must have saved ourselves $75 or so in cab fares. But if you have luggage with you, spend the money on a taxi ride -- you'll be glad you did.
All in all we had a nice stay at the Holiday Inn Express, and we liked the location and modern rooms. We paid $195 for a Friday night stay in May, and all in all we feel the price was a bit steep for what you get. I'd say a fair price for the room we stayed in would be in the $120-$140 range. Otherwise no complaints.







Value
Location
Value
Rooms
Rooms




