Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Precruise hotel Istanbu?l

I just got back from Turkey. I'd recommend the Armada Hotel, where I stayed in Istanbul at the beginning and end of my trip. (I was on a tour with Overseas Adventure Travel, so I don't know what the room rates were, since they were included in the tour.) Armada is considered to be in the Sultanahmet section of the city (i.e. the Blue Mosque neighborhood). But it's on the far end of that neighborhood, and therefore in a quieter, less touristy area with a walk of several minutes to the core of the Sultanahmet section, where the attractions and the crowds are.

The hotel is converted from an old Ottoman building and the public areas are beautiful and genuinely interesting to look at. I felt like a "tourist" just walking around and studying and admiring the lobby and the restaurant and especially the antiques scattered around the lobby, hallways and restaurants. As soon as you enter the lobby you see a pool with turtles--healthy looking things that look like they're enjoying life. My favorites things to look at were the beautiful carts and white crochtet-trimmed linens and all sorts of brass containers used to serve breakfast (which, by the way, was a buffet full of delicious items such as good quality dried fruits and jams and pastries and marinated cheeses and varieties of olives and tomatoes and cucumbers and breads and hot pastries). There's a lovely view of the Bosporus from the upstairs restaurant, and the view from the adjoining terrace is spectacular, especially the nighttime view of the Blue Mosque (SultanAhmet Mosque).

The rooms were fairly nice looking, with pretty painted cabinets and coordinating decorative wood on the walls. They were not gigantic, but I considered them to be pretty large, with plenty of storage space and table surfaces, and were larger than most of the rooms I've stayed in in Italy, for example. The bathrooms were fine, and had tubs with hand-held showers. Everything worked OK in both rooms. The bathroom had some really nice olive oil soap. The negatives were that in the first room I occupied, at the beginning of the trip, the carpet was pretty dirty, or, if "clean," it may have had a lot of permanent stains. In the second room, the pillows stank of cigarette smoke and the whole room had a mild residue of cigarette smoke odor, to my sensitive nose. In both rooms the lights were too dim for me to read comfortably.

I don't know how many stars the hotel has, and I don't know what factors affect the star rating. It has elevators, and I think that's the hotel where Internet was available in a business center for $5/hour, but I didn't try to use it.