Quite possibly the worst hotel I've stayed in (Praga Hotel Madrid)

Member Name: louiseypees

Product:	Praga Hotel Madrid
Date:	05/08/09 (39 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap-ish

Disadvantages: Awful

For our summer holiday this year we decided that the cheapest way for us to have a 4*, multi centre, 2 week break on a bit of a budget was to go completely independent and book all the individual components ourselves. So emerged the 2009 tour of Spain - calling at Barcelona, Madrid, Seville and finishing up on the Costa Del Sol for that real "brits abroad" holiday vibe.

Madrid was stop 2 on our tour, and we chose the hotel in pretty much the same way as we picked all the other hotels for the trip - we did some bargain hunting. We found when booking Madrid hotels that it was really tough to get decent prices in the city centre. We decided, based on the description of the Hotel Praga that its location slightly out of the city centre wouldn't be a huge problem, and the price was tempting enough to make us hit the "book now" buttons.

We knew straight away we'd made a big mistake with this hotel. The taxi ride from the station took us past some decidedly seedy looking areas of the city - unfortunately it stopped bang in the centre of the seediest area we'd seen. Still, the hotel looked clean and newly decorated from the look of the lobby, so we tried not to show our horror all over our faces. All hope was lost, however, when we entered our room.

Setting foot in a hotel room for the first time is always a bit of a heart-in-mouth moment, while you wait to make the "oooh it's lovely" or "oh well I suppose it's just somewhere to sleep" judgement. I'm sorry to say this didn't even really qualify as somewhere to sleep. The bed was the size of a postage stamp, and was quite clearly the very cheapest bed they could find - think of a camp bed, just a little taller (and so that little bit more rickety) and you're somewhere near. The whole time we stayed here I had terrible backache from the shabby sinking bed (not something I suffer from usually), and every movement in the night from either of us resulted in the bed bouncing around for about 5 minutes. I barely slept the whole time here.

Moving on from the "so terrible you wouldn't find it in a brothel" bed, the rest of the room wasn't much to write home about either. With around 1ft of space either side of the bed, and 2ft at the end (which was mostly taken up by a fixed desk and a chair), it was hardly spacious. Things didn't get much better in the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet properly was pretty much impossible due to the proximity of the bidet - legs akimbo on the bog isn't the most dignified of positions! Half of the bath was hidden behind a wall too, making getting in and out of it less than easy. I've never felt more squashed in to a hotel. There's no way that this hotel was even approaching full, or ever could be - why on earth they chose to have so many rooms, and make them so tiny is beyond me.

Looking out of our window didn't offer much relief from the claustrophobia - facing inwards and on the 2nd floor, we had absolutely zero natural light. We couldn't tell if it was night or day.

So we tried to escape. The abrupt man on reception informed us that there were "loads of nice restaurants" on the same street as our hotel, and that they were "much cheaper than the city centre, and just as good". Sounded brilliant. Unfortunately, all we saw were smoky, fly-infested bars and deserted restaurants, all of which were hideously overpriced. We were desperate for somewhere even half appealing, but there wasn't one place we were prepared to risk our health for. That first night, to our utter dismay, we ended up going to Dominoes Pizza! We later found, when we ventured into Madrid, that eating out in the city centre is fantastic - cheap, cheerful and plenty of choice! Quite why we were advised to look around the Beirut-style suburb we were staying in is beyond me.

Any official description of this hotel that you'll find claims that it is 5 minutes' walk from the nearest metro station. This is a big lie. It is a minimum of 10 minutes, through shiftyville. It is also nowhere near the Vicente Calderon stadium, which we were led to believe was practically next door (which deeply upset my other half!). The area is awful. We even had an attempted pickpocketing on the way back from town to the hotel. It's just SO shifty.

To add insult to injury, the cleaners in this place are the loudest people on earth - quite why they decided that 6:30am outside our bedroom door was a good place to start an hour long bitching session/sing-song/shouting and laughing competition is beyond me. I'm not one to complain in hotels - I never have before - but we had to call front desk in the end in an attempt to shut them up. We also felt like our stuff was getting a little too much interest from the cleaners - my other half's PSP was moved from one bag to another, and a lot of things seemed to have been looked through. We felt really unsafe and ended up faking a whole day in the hotel by leaving the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and the TV blaring so that the cleaners wouldn't have access to our belongings again.

Add to this some other minor niggles, like the front desk being the slowest I've ever come across, with every request taking a minimum of two "we've been waiting here for half an hour - where is the thing I've asked for" phone calls, and you have a truly awful hotel! Quite how this is worthy of a 4* rating, I'm not sure. Avoid, avoid, avoid!

Summary: Avoid, avoid, avoid!