Balmes - Barcelona, Spain 

I will start by saying the hotel is fine. We took advice from this site and booked rooms facing the courtyard (paid 20 Euros extra per night per room) and it was incredibly quiet. We liked the hotel's location and access to dining spots. The small pool was very pleasant. The staff was very grumpy and did nothing to make us feel welcomed. Personally, I think all but one of the staff we met should be fired. There should be a reason that hotels are considered to be part of the hospitality industry. I think if I checked in again I would immediately make it known that I was not going to tolerate the unpleasantness of the staff. Additionally we wanted to change something on our reservation. This was impossible to do via email or phone calls we made before we left the United Sates. We wound up keeping the reservation as we originally booked but we did feel scammed. All this being said, I still would stay there again. We found the rooms to be perfectly cleaned and maintained. One final tip, we wandered over to the "Passeig Gr?cia" a beautiful boulevard about three blocks from the hotel. We had a quick breakfast of coffee and pastries at a cafe .... it turned out to be a $75 breakfast for four of us. My guess is this is just emblematic of the priciness of this particularly elegant thoroughfare - cafes off on side streets charged a fraction of this cost.

The hotel was in a good location, but there were several issues that ruined the experience for me. First of all, if you are not fluent in Spanish, this is NOT the hotel for you. The staff seemed very annoyed to have to speak English with us. I understand that we're in their country, so why should they have to speak our language? But it is a hotel, it happens. Every hotel guest we encountered was British (and spoke English with the staff), so this isn't an uncommon occurence for them. Secondly, my bedsheets and pillowcases were covered in brown stains. It was quite gross. And last but not least...the airline lost our luggage, and our cell phones did not work overseas. The manager seemed very annoyed that we gave the airlines the hotel's phone number as our contact number. When we asked simple questions about the airport, we were given short, gruff answers that were far from helpful. Where is the service here? it wasn't a cheap hotel, they could at least pretend to be understanding of our situation. Needless to say, I will never stay at this hotel again.