First of all, this hotel is not very close to the airport at all. Keep this in mind if you decide to stay here. It's about a 15 minute drive ($40 taxi ride) from the airport. It would be helpful to leave extra early if you are planning on catching a flight. The only way to and from the airport is via Deerfoot Trail, which gets extremely busy!
The front desk staff seemed uninterested at best, bordering on rude. We were given a room on the main floor. This won't work well if you have a lot of luggage...there's a flight of stairs to climb and drag your suitcases up. The hallway was like a sauna. It was so hot we could barely stand it. Our room was freezing, old and rundown. The tub was chipped and had hair in it. You couldn't turn the faucet off...so there was always water running. The linens were clean on one of the beds, not so much on the other. We were exhausted and just wanted to grab a bite to eat at the restaurant and go to bed.
The restaurant only had two people working on the floor. When my husband ordered a simple mixed drink the waitress told us that the bartender just started the day before and didn't know how to mix drinks. She brought us the drink manual and asked us to look up the recipe so he could make it. We decided to just get a glass of wine instead. We both ordered the Chicken Parmigiana. It ended up being a large portion of fried meat with processed cheese and canned tomato sauce. Not very good at all. We ate and returned to our room.
The walls in our room were paper thin. We could hear every word the woman next door was saying during her phone conversation. Luckily it didn't last long. Had there been more than one person having a conversation, or watching TV in the next room, it would be impossible to sleep.
Before going to bed, my husband went to the front desk to ask about getting a taxi to the airport for the following morning. The woman at the front desk was extremely rude. She scolded him for asking if someone at the front desk could call him a taxi and told him he could call the taxi himself.
So off to bed we went right along with a noisy heater and running faucet... we had a miserable sleep.
My husband and I both do a fair bit of traveling for business. In fact we will be returning to Calgary several times in the next year! The rude staff, rundown rooms and paper thin walls at the Holiday Inn Calgary Airport made us realize that we would NEVER book a room there again. I highly recommend looking elsewhere for a place to spend the night!
I suspect that the staff at the Holiday Inn Calgary Airport don't feel the need to be overly nice to people because they get so much business from airlines, their cancelled flights and stranded passengers.