Note: all my recent vacation in Ireland Yelp reviews will have the same 1st paragraph preamble, for…read morejust the review itself skip to the 2nd paragraph.
On a whirlwind 2 week vacation to Ireland, the girlfriend & I tried to see & experience absolutely as much of this incredible land as we could. We did not accomplish every last activity we wished we could have on our rather ambitious itinerary. Nonetheless, we did discover a land of numerous stunning & magical wonders. We did see a land of unending natural beauty. We did learn of a land with a monumentally long history of trials, tragedies & triumphs. We did get to meet many kind, humorous, warm & generous people. Our vacation to Ireland was just 2 weeks, but that was time enough to know this is a land easy to love & a land to be sorely missed.
Fresh off the plane, the girlfriend & I took the Airlink all the way to the Central Bus Station which is a conveniently short walk to the Maple Hotel. Being the 1st of 5 hotels in our Ireland trip, I really wanted to love this place but knew that any sort of grand hotel anywhere remotely near Temple Bar for cheap wasn't completely realistic. It was with lowered expectations that we checked into our room. The Maple Hotel met some of those very much lowered expectations, fell short in some ways & exceeded expectations in one aspect.
Fortunately, the girlfriend & I both packed light (just 1 carry-on each) as there is no elevator in the Maple Hotel. Getting to any room means climbing stairs & hauling your stuff up those stairs. The room was seriously tiny. The room had a full size bed & barely enough space around it for 1 person to walk. The room had its own bathroom, but this was tiny too. As small as all of it was, this was fine with us & manageable. What wasn't so fine was the smell. The room smelled like the walls were impregnated with old cigarette smoke & then freshly painted over. It was nice that the room looked like it had a fresh coat of paint, but the smell meant keeping the window open to air it out. Otherwise, the room was fairly clean. The girlfriend did, however, get a couple series of bug bites while sleeping here which made me think bedbugs were a possibility.
A few other notes concerning the room itself: the toilet was temperamental & would not completely flush reliably, no washcloth was provided (apparently not uncommon, only 1 of the 5 hotels on this trip had washcloths) & the phone in the room does not call out at all.
Regarding some hotel services: there is a payphone in the lobby but it devours money without connecting calls, there is no private car park (though their website seems to imply there is), there is free wifi but its range is mostly limited to the lobby area, there's a small pub in the hotel behind the front desk & a breakfast (served 8-10am downstairs below the front desk) is included with the room every morning.
The included breakfast was easily the highlight. One of the choices available was the "Irish breakfast" (1 egg, 2 sausage, 2 rashers, pudding*, beans, toast, coffee, OJ). I had this every morning of our stay & it was a great way to start the day.
The 3 best things the Maple Hotel has going for it are: its location not far from Temple Bar, a decent breakfast included with the room fare & the relatively cheap room rate. Everything else about these accomodations leaves a little or a lot to be desired. With the advantage of hindsight (& having stayed at our last of 5 hotels in Ireland, also in Dublin near Temple Bar), I now know that there are better, cheaper & more centrally located accomodations to be had. On any future visit to Dublin, I will definitely try to stay at our 5th hotel, which was also in Dublin & where we stayed our last night in Ireland before heading home. While I will always remember my 1st days in Ireland fondly, the fact is that there are better hotels for the money in Dublin around Temple Bar.
*there's a white & a black pudding served throughout Ireland, this one was closer to the white, but more like a grilled liverwurst
