Locanda DI San Martino - Hotel E Thermae Romanae

- Location is outrageously perfect: in the very heart of Matera. - Our room was nice: nice decor, nice bed, big in size, private entrance, private terrace with a view. The hotel is in fact a combination of real authentic caves - each room being a private cave. Perfect privacy, good renovation (small shower though). - Breakfast was just AMAZING. Italian perfection.

- The billing. For our check-in, we had one member of the staff that clearly was under-trained. We told him we payed the hotel in advance by wire transfer three times (we were asked by email to do so). Checking out the next day, the staff recharged our credit card. The morning team hasn’t been told about the wire transfer (communication issue). We still didn't receive the money 10 days later. So unprofessional. - The parking. Things were initially quite smooth : we were given an address for a parking near the hotel. We went there and park. The parking overcharged us with 5€ (25€ instead of 20€ for the night) which is obviously not professional. The real problem was the access to the hotel with our 30 kg luggages: 10 minutes walk in slippery stairs, a total nightmare. And the problem here aren’t the stairs, it’s that nobody actually told us about them so we didn’t organize accordingly (backpacks for example). Second parking problem, when we check out staff actually told us our car was moved and not in the parking anymore. Nobody actually asked us about moving the car or anything. It was a total surprise. We had to take a transfer from the hotel to the new parking location. Transfer was a group thing and absolutely uncomfortable so definitely not a nice additional touch to the whole parking experience. - The spa experience. High expectations there since it wasn’t included in the room price (20€ per person). Well the cave pool did deliver: very big, very nicely done. The rest of it wasn’t that nice. The whole experience is about traditional roman therme (different temperatures rooms and pools). It’s actually not really that because in traditional therme you would have several pools at different temperatures. There was only one pool and then rooms where the air was at different temperatures. We didn’t go for the hammam since the smell was awful (hot mold...). Sauna was okay but small and with nothing special.