DAN PANORAMA HOTEL

People often ask us where we stay when we are in Jerusalem. The answer is quite simple. Unless we are crashing with the kids at their place, we stay at the Dan Panorama Hotel. The Dan P is our usual home in Israel. Frankly, we have stayed there so many times that the staff at the front desk and the dining room staff all know us by name. We wouldn’t stay at any other hotel.

The hotel is your basic clean and comfortable hotel. The rooms that we get are always nice, and almost always face the Old City. Because we belong to the E Dan Club, we get a room upgrade and a free newspaper each morning as well as chocolates and bottled water when we check in.

Breakfast at the hotel is a feast. Of course. We genuinely enjoy our breakfasts there. The fruits and veggies are always incredibly ripe and beautiful. The various fishes are all enticing and odorless. The salads are to die for. The made for you omelets are also quite tasty. We love bringing the chef a plate full of what we want cooked in our omelet and then having him deliver it a few minutes later to our table. Frankly, we love breakfast there. And shabbat meals at the hotel are like being at a top notch NY affair: food, food, and more food!

The staff at the hotel is what makes this place stand out. The dining room staff are attentive and always ready to bring something to the table. They manage to anticipate our every move.

The front end staff is incredible. Issam Habash, a shift manager at the hotel, is an amazing asset. He remembers people’s names and greets them like long lost family. He is fluent in several languages, and he is a total gentleman. Issam is also our secret source for cars, guides, airport transports, and just about anything else we need. Issam is sort of like an old fashioned Concierge. He can get just about anything done! We asked Issam to arrange a car and a driver for us for a full day’s worth of touring. He got us a super price and apparently monitered our progress the whole day via telephone with the driver.

As great as Issam is, the entire front end staff is wonderful. They are all well trained in hospitality and service.

The hotel is, as we said before, our Jerusalem home. We are quite comfortable there and enjoy staying there very much. There are more expensive hotels, fancier hotels, bigger hotels, and certainly lower quality hotels. The latter we ignore. The former holds no interest for us, because the Dan P is our Jerusalem home.