We mainly interacted with the customer-facing staff members (front desk, restaurant), they spoke English well and extremely friendly. There is a little bit of a cultural difference (expected); my parents spoke to them in Mandarin while my wife and I spoke to them in English, the entire time they looked at my parents while speaking to them in English, my wife and I weren't offended; in this culture, you make eye contact with the adults rather than the 40-year old "kids".
The rooms were clean upon arrival. However, they may be short staffed (or really busy) as we found our rooms weren't vacuumed until the 3rd time we requested for them to clean the rooms--we didn't request it daily.
We have family in Taipei and it was easy for them to pick up to go to places since the hotel was right next to the freeway entrance. We didn't use public transportation but our family told us was 15-20 min. away. We did use the taxi once, the hotel helped us called for one and almost spent the entire day at the Global Shopping Mall ($125NT) about a mile away.