Best Western Elysium Design Hotel - Athens, Greece     

Booking: We booked through last minute. The photos of the hotel seemed quite nice and the price was very good. I don't remember reading bad reviews of it so we booked it. When we got to the hotel we found that the information displayed on the website was wrong and misleading. We decided to go to another hotel the next day and ask for a refund to last minute. Area: I've been to more than 15 cities all over Europe and I've never found an uglier and more unpleasant area than this (even the red district in Frankfurt was nicer!). The nearest metro station is Omonia. When we exit the metro station (at 10:30pm), we saw police everywhere, on the main street. As soon as you go away from the main street, the police desappears and all sorts of things happen. Prostitues everywhere, getting into cars, getting out of cars, girls, boys, we even saw a couple of guys taking a cocaine line in the street while we where having dinner. We went with the idea of having a relaxing and enjoyable weekend but this was not the kind of place where you want to walk at night, not even only to the metro station (it might be different during the day). My advice is that you should check what the travel guides say about this area, if I only had checked that before booking! Hotel: How to say this. As soon as you see the entrance you get an idea. Whatever photos you've seen in the web, there highly retouched and visually enhanced, so to put it simple, they are very misleading. The hotel is in bad condition and very outdated and what makes it worse is that they've added 1 designer chair in the lobby of each floor and that's why it's called 'Design Hotel'. As for the rest, the floor tiles are of bad quality, the painting on the walls is old and it's rather dark. It's not what you see in the pictures. Room: We booked a room with hydromassage bath. When we got there we found that there was no such thing in our room, or in any room of the hotel. Apparently the information on the website we booked through was incorrect and the hotel has Hydroshower, no bath. I guess this could be something nice, but not if the Hydroshower faces a very poor curtain and the water spread all over the bathroom and even into the room! The bathroom was very small and the only nice thing was the sink. The room itself was small with very unconfortable matress, very noisy (all the rooms face the street) and outdated. It looks nice on the pictures but it's different when you get there. Breakfast: It was the worst breakfast we had, and we've had very bad ones. There were 4 tables in the breakfast room. We were 8 people having breafast and we had to queue to get coffee, queue again to get a piece of cake, there was no milk and the rest was very poor. The good thing: The only good thing was the manager. As soon as we saw the area, the hotel and the room (with the hydrosower that sent water all over the room) we decided we were going to change to another hotel. The manager wrote us a letter stating we had stayed only one night and that he was happy to give us a refund for the other nights. Very nice guy. We got a nice 3* hotel for a bit more near the Acropolis. Totally worth it!