Search for article, wine, hotel, restaurants and other recommendations

Friday 29 December 2017

Hotel Review: Elite Hotel Academia



From a family perspective with two adults and two children we set to try out the newly opened Elite Hotel in Uppsala. It is branded as a 4 star hotel, like all Elite Hotels in Sweden. We booked a family room with bath/shower and two double beds.
The hotel has a golden exterior design and offers conferences, a gym and three restaurants. They also offer in room service and minibar.

As usual we are doing a full scale review so here goes:

Room
Large family room with a modern interior design. We loved the size of the bathroom and the large bath so both children could play and almost swim in. The bed was very comfortable and we enjoyed the size of the room.
Cleaning on the other hand was not as high in standard and we found several “bad” spots such as many dust collections here and there. Something that bothered me is also that they did not have slippers in room but you had to ask front desk for it.

Room Service
The food was great however the communication between the call and the execution was not. First the menu in the room did not say room service it was made out as Bishop Arms (one of the restaurants). When we called the front desk they did not know either and when we finally established it was the room service menu they did not understand what we ordered because the person behind the phone did not know the menu. Room service and F&B needs to work with their internal communication much better.

Front Desk
Very nice design on the front desk however the construction was made very strange. When you enter the main entrance you are not welcomed directly. The front desk is in the other end of the main floor and you have to walk all the way to the “back” to check in.
It feels also that it is two different hotel operators inside the building. One that manages the conference and one for the hotel rooms. The design differs to a small extent from the breakfast restaurant to the hotel lobby were the lobby clearly has a more premium feeling than the restaurant/ conference section.

Food & Beverage
The food in this hotel is good. They have three units were one is Elite Hotels standard restaurant; Bishop Arms with the normal large beer selection and burgers, fish n chips etc. The breakfast restaurant with conference lunch etc is also very pleasant. We enjoyed the breakfast selection however would love to see more fruit choices and perhaps an egg station with cook to order on omelets or some sort.
The highlight of this hotel is their sky bar and restaurant. It is located on the top floor overlooking the entire Uppsala City. You can see from the castle, the church to the newly build office building, the Jewel. The restaurants is owned by the famous Michelin chefs Melker Andersson and Daniel Couet. The food is a fusion restaurant with influences from the Nordic, Vietnam, South China, North China, Japan and Korea. We adored the view, wine selection and the amazing tasting menu that was prepared for us. The name of this superb restaurant calls Miss Voon a continueing from the Stockholm original branch.
The hotel also have a Sunday Brunch which is a popular destination for the people in Uppsala. Here you can find everything that you hungry for in a brunch and we must say that it is one of the best in the city.

Gym
The training facility is very good. Not many hotels have this size of a gym anymore, especially in the Nordics. With this gym we were quite happy with it and could do a full training if one is creative.

To sum up we enjoyed this hotel very much and would recommend it to other visitors. There are some points that they need to improve however these attributes should come later when the hotel have had its run for 6 months. We will most likely revisit it again for an updated review in the future.

Final Grade: 3 out of 5


Written by Alexander Yü and Sofie Yü