Hotel Gran Palace, since its lobby is on an upper floor of a building, is easy to miss but nonetheless pleasant and conveniently located a block or so from the Plaza de Armes and a few blocks more from the Pre-Columbian museum. It's in a very pedestrian-friendly part of Santiago Centro and, especially because it's high up, is not noisy. Unsurprisingly, probably, it is considerably less grand than it looks online. The rooms are clean and decently appointed...more in line with European 2-star hotels than the average hotel in a major American city. We only stayed there our first night in Chile, before heading South, and it served our purposes well...an approximately US$20 cab ride from the airport, in a very walkable area, had a room available for us at 10 a.m. when we arrived from the airport (no charge for the early check-in we got--that worked for us two other times in Chile as well), reasonably English-friendly. If we had it to do over again we might try spending the day in Vina... more