The rooms are clean and a nice size but that was about it. I don't even remember being asked if we enjoyed our stay when we checked out because I don't think they really cared. On our entire trip this was by far the worst hotel we stayed in for service and staff are also in renovation mode which is a pity because great service trumps old and run down hotel anyday.

just at the checkin you ll understand your not entering a luxury hotel.
you ll still likely be charged in excess of sfr300-350 for a night which is not really a lot for zurich but pays you a nice hotel everywhere else in europe.
Common areas are quite dated
Room size are quite good and furnishing is vey decent.
Bathroom are clean but slightly depressing with their extremely basic look (a bit like hospital's one)
in a nutshell: a decent value business hotel for zurich .

Location, location, location
Right on Bahnofstrasse in Zurich. Ideal location. Near the Rail terminal - 3 minutes walk.
Rooms are small but clean.
Great if you need a place to sleep but intend to spend all day outside......

I stayed at the St Gotthard with my partner for 3 nights from 24th to 27th November 2011.

I come to Zurich quite a bit and have stayed in a number of hotels there. The St Gotthard compares very favourably with most of them. It’s not a high-tech, modern hotel, so if you’re expecting the latest in hotel technology I’d stay somewhere else. But this is quite an elegant old lady of a hotel, a bit past her prime and perhaps in need of a bit of a facelift here and there, but still exuding lots of old world charm that is sadly missing in her younger relations!

We asked for a Junior Suite, which was vast and well appointed, decorated and furnished in the old world style. The bathroom was spacious and the water pressure as powerful as any Swiss waterfall (I think the lady with the room on the 5th floor was unfortunate!). Our bed was large and very comfortable, and the pillows (unlike some reports) so huge you could get lost in them. Our room was on the outside of the hotel on the second floor, so there was a little noise from the trams rumbling past, but the double glazing was quite effective.

One niggle was that the room was very overheated when we arrived, and it took us a while to work out how to turn the heating down. Also the lighting system was a bit eccentric – at first we couldn’t get the table lamps to switch on without the main light being on too (not very romantic!), but by swapping the plugs around we managed to achieve the desired effect.

The mini bar isn’t actually sealed as one reporter suggests – they just put a paper band round the handle to see whether you’ve been in it or not. We used it as a fridge and didn’t get charged for anything.

Wi-Fi is free and seemed quite simple to log into. You don’t need to have anything sent to your cell phone as one reporter says – you just need to ask reception and they will give you a password. Nice to have free Wi Fi by the way – almost every other hotel I’ve been to in Zurich charges about CHF 15 a day for it!!

We didn't watch much TV (we had better things to do!), but you could get BBC and CNN and quite a selection of other English channels for free, so far as we could tell.

Breakfast is fine – no more expensive than other hotels in Zurich. CHF33 only seems a lot because of the massively over-valued Swiss Franc at the moment. If you try and eat out in Zurich, a modest meal for one – two courses and half a bottle of wine - can easily set you back CHF 100 - which is not far off £100 these days! I wasn’t so keen on the breakfast room, which is less stylish than the rest of the hotel and has irritating musak playing all the time. They also have a make-it-yourself coffee machine, and I didn’t rate the serving staff much, one or two of whom barely spoke German. Breakfast at the next door Schweizerhof is a much more elegant affair and about the same price, so you could always go there for your Frühstück!

But overall, I would stay here again. It’s a nice old hotel, very well situated, and a fair bit cheaper than some of the others in the city (compare room prices with the Schweizerhof for example – much more pricey and rooms a lot smaller. Though it has quite a lot of elegance about it!)