Hotel Du Theatre Zurich – Hotel Review
I stayed at "Du Theatre" for a recent business trip. This hotel is located centrally in Zurich, very convenient to the main train station and other "downtown Zurich" hotspots, including a LOT of shopping and restaurants right outside the hotel doors. This is a good thing, and a bad thing because all those restaurants are also bars and they stay open late and make a lot of noise. I had a room facing the pedestrian streets of downtown Zurich, and with the window open it was quite noisy.
Which brings us to our problem. The Hotel does not have air conditioning. This is fairly common in Europe as well as Switzerland, for hotels that don’t cater to Americans. But when the temps get up to 85-90 degrees F in the summer, I can’t imagine that even hardened Europeans are comfortable. So you open the window. And then you hear the noise. So you close the window, and hope for the best.
The breakfast floor has a small buffet Swiss-style breakfast of cereal, fresh sliced meats and cheeses, hard boiled eggs, and of course coffee. If you like coffee, you will really like Zurich. If you must drink decaf, good luck. But if you can handle a cup of espresso that is equivalent to five American cups of coffee, you will do well here. Everyone does business over coffee, and you can easily get a huge caf buz going by dinnertime.
Which is why there are so many great bears in Switzerland. To offset all that coffee :).
Anyway, back to the hotel. Great service, OK breakfast, no lounge or restaurant (not that you need one, with all the bars and restaurants right outside the door) and no A/C. Small rooms, but that’s OK for Biz travellers.
The kicker? It’s about 25% cheaper than most Zurich American-style hotels. For a business traveler, this is a great deal on a no-frills hotel that puts you in the heart of the city. For a leisure traveler used to "European-style" hotels, it would also be good. For an American family taking a European jaunt, I’d skip the "Du Theatre".