Copthorne Hotel - Christchurch Central

Copthorne Hotel

Christchurch Central

We stayed at the Copthorne Hotel Christchurch Central on two nonconsecutive nights. The first night was Sunday, March 6, 2005; half way through our tour of New Zealand. The second night was at the end of our trip on Sunday , March 13, 2005.

The three photographs above were taken on Sunday, March 13, 2005 from Victoria Square Park across Colombo Street. Overall, the hotel stay was quite pleasant. Predictably and expectably, the hotel staff was polite and accommodating. The hotel is ideally located in Christchurch for easy access to the Tramway or a pleasant walk to popular parts of the city.

On our first night, the hotel did try to assign to us a smoking room, but our tour manager helped us get promptly relocated to a non-smoking alternative.

We did encounter an inconvenience with the on-site laundry facility. Coach tours favor hotels that offer laundry facilities. The space on the coach is limited and travelers do not have the luxury to carry enough clean clothing for the long tours.

Copthorne Hotel Christchurch Central boasts of offering coin-operated laundry to their guests, but we found that they only one washer and one dryer for the entire hotel. Not only did we find waiting in line for the single pair of machines to be painfully long, we found that the dryer was taking up to three hours to dry one load of clothes.

We guess that the dryer's ventilation system had not been cleaned because the dryer got hot, but steam spewed out of the door whenever it was opened. Since the steam did not get sucked out of the machine properly, the clothes never dried properly.

The hotel responded to our comments about the dryer promptly and professionally. They offered to dry our clothes in the hotel's dryer's while we dined and they paid for one of the extra cycles of drying that we were charged. Additionally, they called for a service call as promised. I spoke to the service man when I met him as we checked out on the following day.

The world isn't perfect and the problem with the dryer is a relatively small one, but our loss up to two hours to tour Christchurch and a hefty drying charge is compounded when experienced by multiple travelers expecting reliable laundry services. If there was only one washer and dryer, the least the hotel should do is make certain preventive maintenance is always up-to-date on the equipment and their hook-ups.