Lotte Hotel Seoul

Clean and beautiful hotel with attentive, professional staff. The room was spacious, well-maintained, and extremely comfortable. A special thank you to the team for the complimentary room upgrade such a lovely and much-appreciated surprise that made our stay even more enjoyable. Thoughtful service throughout and a truly pleasant experience overall.

Lotte Hotel Seoul is located on top the Lotte Department Store, and is linked to the Euljiro 1(il)-ga station via underground walkways. It is also a maybe 5 minutes to 10 minutes walk to Myeongdong. For food, at the basement there is a decent sized food court, as well as a supermarket, and specialized individual shops that sells souvenirs and stuff. For facilities, there's a gym (free for hotel users with proper racks), pool and sauna (which we didn't try). A gripe of mine is that there is no washing machine. However, they provide laundry service which I find the price to be a little steep. But given the fact it is a 5 star hotel, maybe the prices are reasonable. Everything else not mentioned above is impeccable. For example, the staff are professional and friendly, they helped us to book a taxi for our flight as we will be leaving very early. Buffet is really good but a bit pricey, cleanliness is top-notch. It had been an amazing and enjoyable stay at Lotte Hotel Seoul and we will be staying again in the future.

This hotel is located right beside Lotte Department Store (surprise, surprise), which in turn is concerned to another department store called Avenuel that is in turn connected to Myeongdong underground shopping. The best part is never having to go far for food as the food court beneath Lotte Department Store has a wide selection of Japanese, Korean and Western favourites. Breakfast buffet didn’t disappoint with a vast selection of choices to start your day. The swimming pool was impressive with a glass ceiling and two attendants on duty at all times. Annoyingly the pool was split in half and shared between hotel guests and members. With the generous space, it would have been nice if they could have a kids water play area. Apart from the lobby, amenities and facilities which are stunning, the rooms themselves are dated, slightly tired and in need of a freshen up. It’s comfortable enough, but for a 5-star establishment and the price point, you’d expect something a little more luxurious. Housekeeping was generally satisfactory but lacked attention to detail, with used towels not removed on one occasion. There were other areas that fell short of expectations too. I generally felt the hotel was understaffed particularly when it came to assisting guests with taxis. You would generally expect for a 5-star establishment to have staff fussing over you the moment you exit the lobby and look like you need a cab. Instead you find youself having to figure out where to stand with the valet staff not really giving you much attention (they are valets after all). At check out, we asked for assistance with baggage but had to try to figure out where our luggage were left then try to find someone to take it out to the taxi for us. In summary, a hotel with a killer location in Myeongdong but with rooms in need of an update and service levels that don’t quite live up to reasonable expectations of a 5-star hotel. Also when booking through Agoda, I paid a higher rate for breakfast to be included but somehow that only translated to one person per room being included for breakfast. Contacted Agoda but it was a case of ‘too bad, so sad’. I’d suggest taking screenshots on your mobile of all the screens to support any dispute.