12:12 Hostels

The staff (like Mauricio and Sonia) are amazing. Kitchen facilities are good.

The owner - because of her the place is soviet. She constantly goes around turning off lights and electronics to save money. The fridges with purchasable drinks are off almost all day and the drinks are room temperature because she won’t pay for the electricity! Luckily room temperature is like winter in Moscow because she won’t heat the place either. Hostel policy is to harass guests from around 9.20 am onwards, before check out time (10 am) to see if they are checking out or extending their stay. Presume this inflexible approach is to encourage guests to extend before they have formulated their plans for the day. The owner directed me 3 times to sleep in the same bed that I had had previously (I checked out and 6 hours later checked back in), she is too cost conscious to clean a bed that might be used by the same person later. From the first night (of 3 nights) there was dirty dog footprints on my mattress (she was fully aware of this) and the place is by no means cheap so what is she doing? She tried to impose an invented figure of 100,000 pesos (approximately 3 times the normal amount for a dorm bed) for my friend just because she could, just to make a sly profit, because it was 1 am and alternative arrangements are more difficult to make. As a result I left and we had to find new accommodation in the middle of the night just so we wouldn’t be taken advantage of by her. Obviously no refund was offered for the night I had paid for when I checked in earlier because she is all too happy to take advantage of people and seemingly not at all interested in doing the right thing. WiFi is average and dorm beds are not even long enough for comfortable rest (average European male - circa 183 cm / 6 foot in height). Breakfast is not included in-spite of the steep price and the place is empty because it’s such bad value for money. Terrible experience - she cannot remotely see the big picture and in my opinion has little clue of how to run a business.