IHG’s Hotel Indigo Madrid Princesa is a great location in central Madrid for tourists. In spite of the 35C/95F temperature in the blazing sun on the Fourth of July 2022 I ventured outside for a few hours walking to explore Madrid for the first time. The Royal Palace was a 25-minute walk from Hotel Indigo Princesa. The hotel location was the best part of our Madrid experience. In the room there were a series of incidents that tried my patience with the hotel.
Room Rate = 21,000 points for Two Singles. I paid $105 for 21,000 IHG points.
Best Flexible Rate at time of booking: 160 EURÂ
Arrival
We arrived downtown Madrid on the Metro at Estación de Argüelles from Madrid Airport with one Metro line change. A one-day metro card cost 8.40 EUR from a Madrid Airport metro station ticket machine. The machine offered several languages and was easy to use. I took more Metro rides in the evening on my ticket.
Hotel Indigo Princessa is across the street from the Argüelles Metro Station, if you come out the nearest exit. Our first arrival I managed that, then later than night I exited in a different area and lost myself for five minutes trying to find the hotel.
Check-In
We arrived about 13:30. Room 310 was ready and we were upgraded from the two single beds I booked using points to a King Bed room.
First impression is great with all the art decoration above the bed. The problem is when you are on the bed facing the desk and TV, you face blank slate walls.
The TV turned into the first incident we encountered. I turned the TV on and after a few minutes the remote would not change channels. Then it worked again, then stopped working again. I called the desk and went downstairs for new batteries. The new batteries did not work. Back downstairs to the desk and I was given an entirely different remote control and new batteries. TV worked again.
USB ports by the bed. Open closet concept with refrigerator in cabinet and coffee station in middle space.
The refrigerator never chilled our beverages sufficiently even by the next morning when we left 15 hours later .
One of the big issues with the room is that the July 4 temperature outside the hotel was about 35C/95F on the street and about 80F in this bathroom. The hotel room door opens to a hallway with the bathroom on the left and the main bedroom a few feet past the bathroom door. The room central air conditioner vent is above the hallway entrance facing the bedroom. The room AC barely cooled the bedroom and came nowhere near cooling the bathroom. The bathroom felt like a sauna after a shower.
The following morning I woke to take a shower at 5:30. Water came out of the shower scaldingly hot. I checked the sinks to find the same situation. I turned all the water faucets to total cold and after five minutes sinks and shower were still totally hot water. I called the front desk and the receptionist said she would bring a key for an adjacent room where we could shower. After 10 minutes of running all the faucets and shower I finally felt the water temperature lowering just as the knock on the door delivered the room key. I rejected the key and took a sauna shower in my own room.
The outside temperature had dropped below 75F and I opened the bedroom windows to clear the steam from the room and let in some cooler air than the AC had been pumping out all night.
Some of my room complaints were weather related issues at the hotel and others were annoyances. This experience did not put me off to the hotel. I loved the location of Hotel Indigo Princesa. A supermarket was one block away. Madrid Palace Real was 20 minutes walk from the hotel.Â
The BEST bar and restaurant at Hotel Indigo Princesa had a nice look. People were mostly seated outside at tables on the sidewalk under the trees drinking and dining during the day and evening. We did not eat or drink at the hotel restaurant. We dined and drank beer at a restaurant a couple blocks away from the hotel.
After a quick 18 hours in central Madrid we booked an Uber to drive us to the city bus station for a 9-hour Flixbus ride to Lisbon, Portugal that turned out to be unexpectedly uncomfortable based on our past dozen and more experiences riding Flixbus and other bus services in Europe over the years.
