Old Penang Hotel - Trang Road is a unique building, colourful heritage, easily accessible and a charming and cozy hotel only a few minutes away from all attractions and surroundings : Penang Times Square, Komtar, First Avenue Mall, Prangin Mall, Gama, local famous Hawker Food. All rooms are equipped with TV and aircon together with complimentary bottled water. All bathrooms are with water heater.
Star ratings are intended to indicate the general level of features, amenities, and services to expect. This property is classified according to Giata.
HOTEL STYLE
Budget
Centrally Located
Languages Spoken
English, Chinese, Malay
Location
18 - 30 Jalan Trang, George Town, Penang Island 10150 Malaysia
Old Penang Hotel - Trang Road
34 reviews
Getting there
Great for walkers
Places to stay are graded on a 0-100 scale. The higher the grade, the easier it is for travellers to find restaurants and things to do within walking distance.
OPH room is clean and very small, almost like a square cube. A bed to sleep, a working table and a relatively spacious bathroom. Air-condition and water heater works really good. The bed, mattress, blanket, towel are rather tattered looking.No toileteries. No tissues provided. Thumbs up for being environmentally friendly. I strongly recommend this room for solo travellers who are on the move most of the time ! Otherwise, 2 or more will cause massive congestion
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Date of stay: March 2021
Cleanliness
Service
Sleep Quality
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
5-10 minutes walk from Komtar bus station. Very thin walls, so it's quite noisy. Take some earplugs. Hairs on my sheets, so the sheets hadn't been cleaned :-( There's a big supermarket close by and also a hawker centre for food at night. So, good location but noisy and they don't seem to clean the sheets.
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Date of stay: April 2018
Value
Service
Sleep Quality
Trip type: Travelled solo
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
First impression was ok, logistic location is good, room was not that clean and looked a lot different from what is published in the internet on booking.com and what i booked. I didnt complain, its my first holidays since a long time, so i didnt want to stress. BIG SURPRISE in the 3rd night: At 12.15 am, I was already sleeping, somebody was banging very aggressive on my door. I woke up and opened the door, and i couldnt believe that the staff wanted to check if I am inside the room!!! I told the staff very clear that this is a complete NO GO. After i complained the next day the manager was not really intersted to hear my story from the night before and the reply was a very empty look......then i gave up and just wanted fresh towels and asked if the staff can exchange the old towles. Again I was ignored despite my 4 nights stay the manager didnt really care if i needed something. Budget Hotel should not mean that service and behaviour must be so poor..
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Date of stay: April 2018
Cleanliness
Service
Sleep Quality
Trip type: Travelled solo
Room Tip:Choose an other Hotel
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
This is the first -terrible- review I write after travelling for 1 month+ in Asia. I have also travelled on the cheap in Mexico, and in Thailand on 3 previous occasions. I almost always book the very cheapest accommodation available with aircon and have stayed in plenty of traditional style bamboo huts with a fan in Thailand and Mexico. I usually take other peoples bad reviews with a pinch of salt because I feel that some people expect too much of the cheapest hotels in Thailand, Malaysia etc.
Let me start with saying that we (me and my girl) are a backpacking couple and we are very flexible when it comes to staying at hotels. Since we are on a budget, we do not expect luxurious rooms nor do we have high standards. We have stayed in places where there were bugs, lots of them. We accept that often the places would need some renovation in an ideal world. We accept that the rooms won't always be immaculately clean. This is perfectly fine with us, so long as some effort has been made to remove the traces of previous guests. But this hotel was a real deception and we had to endure 6 nights of it because we had already paid for the full price in advance.
Upon arriving everything seemed fine. The building is beautiful from the outside and the reception hall is nice as well. My girlfriend was feeling unwell so we went up to our room immediately (227) and she just crashed on the bed. Waking up an hour later she wondered where the hell she was because the room (queen room) was not anything like the pictures on Booking (or on TripAdvisor for that matter). On the booking site the queen room looks lovely, with tiles, a neat desk, a nice made-up bed with sheets and a clean looking bathroom. What we got was completely opposite...
Our room had no tiles but an old, very dusty and dirty carpet on top of an even older dustier carpet, full of hairs and even nails of previous guests. We are both sensitive to dust so the carpet wasn't helping much. There was a stain of some kind on the wall, we didn't want to investigate too closely as it was near the sink/bathroom so it's anyone's guess what it was. One of the windows was missing a handle, didn't shut tight and let mosquitoes in (and those aren't welcome).
There were 4 towels on the bed. 2 were "white" (one of them was probably white when it was purchased decades ago), these were for using after showering, fine. The other 2, we were perplexed to discover, were our duvets. They would have been fine as beach towels, quite large in fact for towels. But as bed sheets they were far too small, and on top of that were covered in holes and stains. Holes and stains we can take, but towels for a duvet, really??!? We went to reception to ask for bed sheets on the second night, but upon seeing the cleaning cupboard we could see that these old towels were all they had to offer. The mattress cover had at least 20 tiny holes in it, we stopped counting at 20.
There was an old used tissue on top of the small closet covered in a thick layer of dust. The shower-holder was broken so for my girlfriend it was a struggle since she has long thick hair to wash and only had one hand to do so, as the other hand had to hold the shower head. And then the sink, that one made us want to throw up because it was filthy, covered in hairs of previous guests and the sinkhole was almost blocked with someone else's hairs, disgusting!!!
It would appear that apart from emptying the bin, not a single second was spent removing the mess of any previous guests in our room. The bin was the cleanest thing in our room.
My girl went downstairs after discovering this and showed the woman behind the reception pictures of the queen room we booked online, as we thought they made a big mistake. The woman barely spoke English and after 5 minutes trying to explain the situation my girl just gave up. We do not expect people in Malaysia to speak English, in fact this is something that often annoys us when people complain about hotel staffs level of English... We are not in England!!! But it made us feel more frustrated as we felt like we had no other choice than to accept our fate. There was no way that we would be able to convey our dissatisfaction with the various inadequacies of our room to the staff, so we just lumped it and tried to spend every second possible out of our room.
The frustration built up even more since the Wi-Fi is a joke. Your devices will not recognise the IP-address and you will have to go downstairs to the reception hall to try and connect to the first Wi-Fi which also doesn't guarantee a stable connection. There are 6 or more routers to connect to, all of which work for a few minutes a day at best, and at completely random times. If you manage to connect, make the most of it because it will cut out after 2 minutes. There were times when none of the wifi routers would connect, we walked all round the hotel trying to connect to all of them for half an hour trying to book a taxi online.
We do not recommend Old Penang Hotel - Trang Road AT ALL. There are lots of other budget hotels that will offer nice rooms, just avoid this one as if it's infectious. It's a shame because it wouldn't take much investment to make this hotel nice.
P.S.: Online it states that they offer laundry but they don't. You can leave your laundry in front of Gama supermarket. They have a kitchen room, but no fridge and no cutlery.
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Date of stay: May 2018
Location
Cleanliness
Service
Trip type: Travelled as a couple
Room Tip:Choose another hotel
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
There are tons of good places to stay in Penang and better to spend some few bucks more rather than stay in this hotel there is a mouse in the room And stay is really bad by any standard We stayed only one night and took this due to nearness of Komtar bus station
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Date of stay: May 2019Trip type: Travelled as a couple
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
I'm booked this room because I see the design of the building was so vintage and for me picture provided from booking.com also the same from the room that I got, BUT, it's not full image. 1st, as I open up the room I thought I open up the toilet room as the sink is located in front of the door opening next to TV. The room is as much I expected, it's okay as long as the room have A/C, fan, clean bed, and basic amenities provided. BUT, the toilet is sooooo dirty, like it's haven't been clean for quite sometime and there is a worm came out from the wall whenever we goes inside, so DISGUSTING!! At least as your HK to clean up the bathroom please! As for FO, u are not friendly at all, and I can't even understand a word from one Chinese female FO at all. The location is strategic
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Date of stay: April 2019
Rooms
Location
Service
Trip type: Travelled with friends
Room Tip:just go with family room if u want a bathroom inside ur room instead of sharing bathroom
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
Hair on bed. Dirty carpet. Dirty showers with hair, cigarette butts, used soap, shaving razors and toilet paper. Cigarette ash and butts on toilet. Cigarette smoke in hallway and in very very small room. Extreme fire hazard with all the smokers so this is just a matter of time. Paid 40 ringgit per day with tax but still overpriced. Mouse on day 5 running around on headboard and floor. Do not bring food into your room or mice will find it. Room is too small for 2 people with 3 large bags. Deadbolt and sliding bolts, chain not functioning. Room is relatively unsecure with a very hard shove. Brought my bags up to my room and afterwards the staff offered to help bring them up after the fact. The local wifi is continually overloaded with weak signal and nonfunctional. The router either needs to be on the second floor or the first floor ceiling. The best connection provided 100 KB/s at best but usually did not work. The only accessible refrigerator is in the lobby with the paid drinks. Two eating areas on left and right side with no working refrigerators or microwaves.
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Date of stay: January 2019
Value
Service
Sleep Quality
Trip type: Travelled as a couple
Room Tip:To avoid mice eat at the lunch buffet for 21 ringgit for two at the M Galleria mall go to the...
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
MOUSE UNDER THE BED! We hardly make bad reviews, we look for cheap places and we adapt a bit 'to everything, but in this hotel the dirt, and rudeness has bordered every limit! We arrived at 2.30pm (check in at 2pm) and the room was not ready, after 20 minutes they give us the keys telling us that they will not give us towels because they do not have enough. The girl at the reception was rude and unfriendly. Let's go alone to the room where the sheets had not been changed, there were a lot of hair on the bed. We wait another half an hour and a boy arrives and changes only the sheet and not the pillowcases and blankets (which are not covered but two old rags). The room is dirty, probably never clean, but only the linen change (not always), the carpet has not been vacuumed for years. The shared bathroom is old and in bad condition, but it would also be fine if it were not for the fact that in three days of our stay has never been cleaned! BUT NOW THE MOST IMPORTANT PART ARRIVES: The third and last night we hear noises under the bed after more than an hour we can be sure of what we feared! It was a mouse! But it's still not the worst thing. The worst thing is that when we went down to the front desk to point out the problem the guy did not seem surprised at all, he did not even apologize and being dealt with enough he gave us the keys of the next room where at 2 o'clock we had to move all the our things! The other room was as dirty as before and I do not know if by suggestion or not, but we continued to hear noises all night! In any case, even the little we paid (which is not so much in Malaysia) is still too much to sleep with mice and be treated like that !!!
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Date of stay: January 2019Trip type: Travelled as a couple
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
We stayed at Times Square one. Not a bad hotel but we had to change the room when we arrived because the one they gave us had really dirty walls, flies and mosquitoes inside. Hotel looks nice around reception but rooms need renovation, including wall painting and bathroom (mold around basin). We were happy about location, walking distance to Komtar which is a travel hub. Staff was nice and the room was quiet (we did not have the window). We also appreciated room cleaning service. They have water dispenser. Many places to eat and shop around.
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Date of stay: May 2018
Rooms
Service
Sleep Quality
Trip type: Travelled as a couple
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
When we first arrived we were greeted by staff who were fairly rude, and the check-in process was slow. We received our room key and wern't told anything about the hotel or where our room was. We then found our room after hunting for 5 minutes. The floor of the room felt dirty to touch, and we found 2 dead cockroaches. 1 behind the door and 1 in the bathroom(in pictures). The room only has Malaysian style outlets so if you're staying here make sure you have a wall adapter. We also found 2 worms in the bathroom (one pictured below). They have air conditioning and a giant fan which is nice, but they provide towel esque blankets. So either your room is hot or you turn on the air conditioning(had different temperatures but only 1 temperature would pump out) and be freezing. Wi-Fi is only available in the lobby and only seems to work for social media, Google maps or Google searches wouldn't load. The overall stay was horrible and I would not recommend even as a budget stay.
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Date of stay: November 2017Trip type: Travelled as a couple
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.
There are more places to choose from in the George Town area.
PRICE RANGE
RM 59 - RM 99 (Based on Average Rates for a Standard Room)
LOCATION
MalaysiaPenangPenang IslandGeorge Town
NUMBER OF ROOMS
45
Prices are the average nightly price provided by our partners and may not include all taxes and fees. Taxes and fees that are shown are estimates only. Please see our partners for more details.
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