Very easy to walk to the train station for an early trip. 20 minute walk to the Schlossberg and downtown shops.

Prices were great. Free internet on lobby computer. Drinks and snacks for sale in lobby. Grocery store next door.

This hotel has a very good location, easy access to the heart of the city. The staff is very friendly and smily, always staying with help to your approval. You can find anything you wish at the buffet breakfast table, very good quality food. Garage is also available on a reasonable price.

With the utterly pathetic rate of the Pound Sterling against the Euro (I actually received less than parity!), I was forced by budgetary constraints to try the Ibis chain for the first time.
Last summer, for "A few Dollars More", I stayed at the Weitzer hotel, but as I'd been away to Holland a few weeks previous, I was desperate to keep my costs down.

LOCATION: Directly next door to the main "Hauptbahnhof".
Like all main train stations, it attracts a certain amount of "undesirable elements" that loiter outside, but these tend to keep their excessive drinking or drug pushing amongst their own kind!
Graz is one of the safest and less threatening places I know!
There are two good supermarkets (The Spar and Mercure) close by, with the Spar even open on a Sunday (A rarity in Austria!)

CHECK-IN/CHECK-OUT: No problem whatsoever!. Very smooth and courteous.

ROOM: Large, Comfortable double bed, spacious, but pretty basic.
It reminded me of the kind of places that I used to stay in on school trips.
Reasonable size TV with a fairly wide choice of satellite stations.
Ideal for watching Barbara Karlich (An Austrian afternoon Institution) on.
The bathroom was small, but modern, with a good power shower
My one gripe was that the room was lacking a fridge, but with the weather outside ice-cold, the window ledge served this purpose.
All in all though, very clean!

BREAKFAST: Surprisingly good! This is served in a small room on the 1st floor over-looking the entrance to the station.
Excellent Austrian coffee, Bratwuerstchen (small sausages), scrambled eggs, and a fairly wide choice of cold-cuts were amongst the hi-lights.
There was also a good selection of German language newspapers to peruse.
I'm not too sure though, how they would cope when the tour buses pull-in, and the hotel is 100% full?

CONCLUSION: In the current economic climate, £49 inclusive breakfast and taxes is not too bad.
Would I have paid an extra €40 pn to stay at the Weitzer, given my circumstances? Probably not!
It was ideal to use for the purpose of SSE (Shower,Sleep,Eat).
I would stay in the Ibis again (for the right kind of price) during the winter months, but because of the lack of a fridge( Essential during the hot Austrian summers), I would look else where

I've stayed at the Ibis in Graz twice now, some four years apart. On both occasions I was allocated room 160, which is an accessible room for disabled people. I wonder if they're trying to tell me something?

Anyway, the hotel is perfectly located for rail travellers, alongside the main Graz railway station. There are some shops in the station, including a useful Spar supermarket which opens early until late. There are also a number of restaurants and take-aways in the station.

The hotel itself is just another Ibis; the room has a double bed, a TV, air-conditioning and (in the case of room 160) a large bathroom with walk-in shower that soaks the entire bathroom floor as every walk-in shower I've suffered in a hotel seems to do. I didn't notice the smells mentioned by other reviewers, and the hotel was perfectly acceptable to me.

The city? It's a nice enough place, if not exactly the centre of the universe. The reviewer who complained about the city based on one evening there should possibly have done some research before visiting Austria as everywhere in Austria is like that in my experience; the entire country goes home by about 8 p.m. and pretty much everything is closed in the evenings. That said, there is a "restaurant district" in the city centre, but it's not obvious to tourists following the tram routes.

The funicular ride up to the castle grounds is pleasant (ignore the signs at the tram stops telling you it's not running; it is), and there are some nice views across the city from up there; it's just a pity Napoleon and his little chums blew the castle up a couple of hundred years ago.

All in all, an OK hotel in an OK city.