H10 Universitat - Barcelona, Spain     

This hotel should not be awarded four stars. Yes, the rooms are flawless (if you are so lucky to be assigned a medium sized one: there are very small rooms too). Yes, breakfast is affluent and yes, the complete hotel decoration is beautiful and stylish. Its location is perfect. Staff is generally friendly and adequate. But the service at the reception desk is the worst I've ever had to deal with (and I've seen a lot of hotels, especially in Spain). At arrival we had to wait six hours for our room. Every time we were sent away given the promise that our room would certainly be ready within the next hour. Every time we returned, our room was still not cleaned. When we finally complained, instead of getting an apology, we were treated like small children. I don't have to mention that there was no champagne for us, although some other guests (how do they select them?) did get their glass. Yes, we were suitably dressed, yes we know how to behave. When leaving it was not possible to keep our room any longer (although no other guests were arriving). And finally they charged us 10 euro for calling a taxi. Leaving such a beautiful city, the reception desk of this hotel left us feeling quite uneasy.

We stayed is some wonderful hotels during our three weeks in Europe, unfortunately this wasn't one of them. The Positives: Good location. Ecclectic Decor. The Negatives: 1. The worst beds I've ever slept on in my life. I've stayed in probably 50 hotels, including a dozen across Europe where standards can vary. My whole body aches just thinking about how uncomfortable the bed was. We had two rooms with four twin beds, all four beds were equally awful. Hard, lumpy, mediocre linens, and a bedspread (no comforter) that I personally found abrasive - yes abrasive as in scratching me! 2. The staff was lukewarm at best. When the internet wouldn't work they blamed it on the fact that I used an Apple... when in fact the problem was clearly network related and theirs. They also didn't have our room ready when promised, etc. 3. Rooms in general are spartan with weak air conditioning... very modern, so much as to be "cold" and charmless. Both of our rooms had major noise issues and paper thin walls. We could hear everythign going in adjacent rooms and even adjacent buildings (loud music, hammering, etc from the nearby apartments). The Positives: 1. Good location - very near central sights, subway, etc. Overall I consider this the worst choice we made out of five hotels stayed in this past trip.