Hotel Schmerkotter

Good location for visiting university, fair price for room size and location. Breakfast is somehow limited, served by staff.

It is not so modern, and there is no personnel on reception most of the time. Doors are locked and you have key. Personnel partly do not speak English, hard to understand and to tell your requests, even if they are common.

The room was good, with enough space and a good bathroom as well. The breakfast was also decent: I especially liked that you could easily order scrambled eggs to be freshly made. This would only take them a couple of minutes (albeit during a time when there were few other guests.) There are also parking spots available right in front of the hotel, and the whole street is free to park in, so it is supremely approachable by car as well. The person at the counter also spoke English well enough for normal communication.

It is a very nit-picky complaint, but the beds were almost too soft somehow. I prefer a somewhat stiff mattress for back support, but these caused me to sink away. No doubt there are people who like that, however. Aside from that, I felt the breakfast was serviceable, but no more than that. While I really liked that you could have scrambled eggs made to order, any other aspect of it was middle-of-the-road in quality. Also, there was no way to get uncarbonated water, which was somewhat annoying to me. But both of these complaints are barely even worth considering in the grand scheme of things. However, a much bigger thing to keep in mind is that it seems to be quite far away from the center of Bochum. I was there to give a talk at the university, but due to the complex of highways that are on that side of the city, had to walk quite far and take some roundabout ways to reach my destination. That night, when I went out to get food, I found that I would again have to travel quite far to find a decent offering of restaurants.