Radisson Blu Daugava Hotel, Riga

I'll start off with the good things about this hotel.
- The view from the riverside of the hotel, is the best one in town.
- The location is good when it comes to getting to the old town or reaching most of the public transport to go almost anywhere.
- The breakfast is quite good.

Now to the negatives.
- First of all, we are members of the Radisson Rewards, and have booked a large room with a river view for our stay of over a week. However, the overly rude receptionist wanted to send us to the park-view side of the Hotel, and to the side of the hotel which was for regular guests - claiming they were full.
This ended up with third floor, river-view and non-rewards side of the hotel. I'll describe the room.
- The AC was noisy and impossible to regulate - it would change itself to a warmer temperature than what we wanted it to be in the room, even if we had set it to a cooler temperature.
- The beds and bedsheets were awful. It was too hard and the sheets did not at all breathe.
- To adjust to the bed and the non-working AC, we ended up putting our duvets away since it would be too hot with them on. However, the housekeepers kept on putting the duvets back in their covers every single day.
- The housekeepers did put duves back in the covers, but did not change our towels despite them being on the floor - which is what indicates they need to be changed - like their posters say too.
- Fridge has a lock on it instead of being normal magnetic ones.
- Beds stood on literal pirate peg-legs and were wobbly.
- You'll have to deal with the noises from the people with cars and bikes outside all night, but this is not really the fault of the hotel. You can also almost hear everything that is going on in the hallways, and this is something the hotel can do something about, as the doors literally can fit a letter underneath from outside to inside of the room. It is very disrespectful of the other guests to not keep quiet between 22-08 in the hallways.

About halfway through our stay, we get to change to a higher floor and larger room, but still not on the Rewards-side of the hotel.
This room has at least a functioning AC, however the bathroom is way too hot and stinks. It is dangerous to take a shower in there because it gets way too warm. Again the housekeepers kept putting our duvets in the covers and not changing our towels.

I will also mention that if you go to the breakfast at certain times, there will be a huge coffee queue, since only one of the coffee machines actually has good coffee.

First of all, we paid for a big room with a river-view as Rewards-guests, how can you not reserve the room for us who are staying for over a week? This is great disrespect.

Ok so some conditions on this review: (1) we booked the least expensive option for the hotel (2) we have stayed in Riga before in an airbnb and we only chose Radisson blue because we thought it would be easier for parking (3) we got a 15% on this booking since we joined the Radisson blue membership thing.

The rooms really feel like they could be a time capsule for immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union (so that might be a plus for some people!). They were intermittent sulfur odors (at least in the hallway on the 9th floor). There is no hair dryer (or it’s really old see photo attached) and there is no smart tv. The decor and color choice is objectively mediocre at best. We felt we were staying at a best western or a motel 6. However, location is decent for price and the staff were great! We just feel like for our stay for three nights there were similar hotels with better conditions for the same price. Also airbnbs were usually way cheaper and just as close from old town. In my opinion, unless you have rewards or something similar, you might as well just book the Radisson closer to the center of Riga or look for other hotels or airbnbs.

I am a premium member of Radisson who has stayed in many of the hotels.

This one was by far the worst, leaving such a bad taste in my mouth…

Let’s begin - the room was not ready on time - fine - I can deal with this, we even got a free drink.

When ordering drinks at the bar, premium members receive a 10% discount on food and beverages - they told me it’s only for soft drinks and not alcohol….

When getting ready to head to the spa, we finally found out that it’s 15 euro extra per person. After spending over 700 euro for our stay, this is insulting.

The breakfast was the exact same every day, with no attention to the dirty plates being allowed to pile up.

After getting annoyed, I then had a look at more reviews online. To my shock, I just found out that the management of this hotel has paid people to give good reviews who didn’t even stay there - before staying at the hotel I checked the first few reviews - the good reviews were what convinced me to stay here - I feel cheated. Have a look at all the random Arabic names coming up below - while I stayed here I didn’t even see a single person of Color.

Upon leaving the hotel nobody bothered to ask how our experience was.

This hotel is the worst of the Radisson group, and I’ll be reaching out to the head office to make this same complaint.

Think twice about staying here.

Positives: Nice view.