The King David Hotel in Prague: A Heimish 5-Star Hotel
During our recent trip to Prague, we decided to lodge at the King David Hotel in Prague. The website for the hotel openly states: “The Hotel KING DAVID Prague is a five-star boutique kosher "Le Mehadrin" hotel open all year round.” A more-than-surface-level investigation as to which 3rd-party provided the hotel with a 5-star rating did not turn up any results. Upon proof of this, I am happy to update my post.
Which kind of tells you where I am going with this review. But let’s begin.
The Good
First and foremost, this was by all means a comfortable and enjoyable place to stay. We paid $501 for two nights in a Standard Room, which included a free breakfast buffet. The location was convenient (a 5-minute walk from the main tourist drag and right next door to the main train station). The staff were friendly, and it was nice to have all the Jewish amenities one would need right there in the same building. This includes a full-service shul. Mincha and mariv are scheduled back-to-back around plag hamincha (as is common on Shabbat here in Israel) which makes it easier to get a minyan and also is less-interruptive to one’s travel and touring plans. There is also a mikvah (for men and women, if I am not mistaken). The times for eating are also quite flexible (and family-friendly), and there is a cafe should you get hungry when the main dining room is not open. There is free, seemingly unrestricted wi-fi for guests, meaning video sites like YouTube (I didn’t try Netflix) weren’t blocked.
The food was also tasty and plentiful. I tasted most of the dishes that were available at both dinner and breakfast and I enjoyed all of them, though none of them stood out in particular. I liked that there were various jams and also fresh breads with a toaster. Each meal had a selection of desserts as well.
The bathroom in our room was also nice. It was decorated with a yellowish granite for the sink basin. The bathtub was large and had a three-mode shower with a rainfall head and a glass shower door.
We were there at the end of “Bein Hazmanim” for the “Charedi” population in Israel, so the clientele at the hotel during our stay skewed heavily towards that denomination. The upside of this is that davening was almost always Nussach Ashkenaz, which was quite surprising!
So for an Orthodox Jew, this was quite a treat! Living like a goy while being a Jew is one of my favorite experiences, and I got to do all of that while staying at this hotel.
The Minor Things Add up
But I don’t think it would quite meet the general population’s definition of what a 5-star hotel would be. To me, “5-star” means there is nothing you see that is going wrong or is out of place. However, at the King David Hotel in Prague this was most certainly not the case.
The most egregious thing was that one of the floors was undergoing a renovation during our time there. As a result, there was rolled-up carpet blocking the main thoroughfare without as much as a sign requesting patience while the renovation is taking place or warning guests of the hazards ahead of them. The carpet remained in this way for more than a day, even though there was a door to the floor that the carpet could have been hidden behind when work wasn’t being performed.
In our room, parts were starting to show wear-and-tear and both our towels and sheets had holes in them. When I sleep at other higher-end hotels (or really any hotel for that matter), I expect to feel like I am sleeping on a cloud, yet our mattress did not seem to have that plushness one associates with a hotel and also had a defined inward slope towards the center. The bathroom door was dented because if it is left open it can interfere with the door to the room.
At meal time, there were periods when the buffet dishes were empty (a 5-star facility would replace them as soon as things started running low). When I ate in the cafe, I was looking at an unbussed table the entire time I was eating my food (30ish minutes). The cookies they were serving in the lobby were still from Pesach (and mass-produced) despite it being two days after the holiday ended.
A lot of this may come down to staffing (I don’t know the condition of service-level employment in the Prague right now) but surely in a 5-star setting if there is something that could potentially affect a guest, I would call for reinforcement from where there are less-critical operations taking place.
Conclusion
The potential for this to be a hands-down 5-star experience is definitely here and would only take a little bit of effort. And for the target market for this product that is not necessarily familiar with much beyond what this hotel offers, then I’m sure it can certainly feel like a 5-star experience. But it has that heimish, shrug-the-shoulders-when-things-aren’t-perfect air to it that can be excused once or twice, but at a certain point detracts from the 5-star rating. The hotel management can’t become comfortable with their “monopoly” status on the Religious Jew market and keep on letting things slide - perhaps the renovations we saw taking place were the beginning of an effort in this direction. This is all the more so as I assume the owners are trying to benefit from any association (which there isn’t as far as I can tell) with the much more famous King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which, without having ever stayed there as a guest, I know is a high quality product.
Even compared to the other “Religious Jew Travel Experience” I have been on (a trip to a Kosher hotel within a hotel) in Cypress this barely surpasses it in terms of quality and that program didn’t purport to be 5-stars.
I did a little comparison browsing on booking.com to see what else there is at the same price point and it would seem that there are other facilities that purport to have the same level of luxury as the King David Prague and all the location and other benefits. If having everything you need from a Jewish perspective right there and included in your stay (and without any possible anti-semitism) then the King David is the right choice for you. Otherwise, stay in one of these other hotels at the same price point and join the King David for services and pay to eat once or twice in their dining room.
King David Hotel in Prague: 3.9 stars