Golden Tulip Times Hotel - Bucharest, Romania 

Nice hotel eclipsed by bad management
Posted: Thu, Jan 17 2008
First the positive: it is a new hotel with nice rooms and clean, modern common areas. It is next to the Piata Muncii subway station, which means you can be anywhere in the city in minutes without a car. There are several restaurants nearby, an ING bank location, a gas station and a 24 hour supermarket within very short walking distance. Now the negative: firstly, the management is sloppy and insolent. I booked my room through Priceline.com and this was a huge issue for them. Shortly after I booked it I needed to change the reservation to add a third person to the room. Since I couldn't do it through Priceline.com, I had to contact the hotel directly. I wrote a detailed email to the reservations department with the changes, asking for the new price; days went by and no answer. I called several times and was told different things each time I called. Finally, I was quoted a price of 30 euros per day for the third person which seemed reasonable. When we checked in, we were told it would be actually 40 euros per day for the extra person to cover his breakfast as well. We accepted, and the front desk told us we are welcome to have breakfast between such and such hours on the mezzanine level. However, the second day, when we showed up, we were told by the breakfast staff that our room did not include the breakfast buffet and we would have to pay extra. This naturally irritated me and I went to the front desk trying to straighten it out. How naive of me! They had no idea what I was talking about, different staff altogether, standing firm behind the notion that we do not have breakfast included. On the weekend the management was nowhere to be found. When they did show up on Monday, the assistant manager informed me that only people who pay the full price listed on the wall in the lobby get the breakfast buffet. Anyone who pays a discounted rate, such as we did through Priceline.com, has to pay for the breakfast separately. Nowhere is this stated in the Priceline reservation, because I would not have booked a room without breakfast; I would have kept searching for a hotel with a nice breakfast included since this is absolutely standard hospitality practice in any modern country and not a big deal at all. The assistant manager took a hostile attitude toward us and made further ridiculous claims such as that we booked a room only for one person through Priceline (the receipt I presented to him clearly showed he was lying), that he has no control over what Priceline offers (hard to believe that they do not have a specific contract with specific terms), finally shouting to me "We haven't even been paid by Priceline yet!". Evidently I don't control their arrangement with Priceline.com; I prepaid the room through Priceline, which charged my credit card and Priceline is responsible for paying them according to the terms of their contract. Horrible. Humiliating. Zero customer service. If the room hadn't been prepaid we would have walked out immediately. The second negative is the light odor of the sewer that wafted gently from the bathroom into the entire room at all times. The room looks great and so does the bathroom, but there is this odor that emanates. I suspect shoddy plumbing behind the nicely tiled walls. It prevented us from eating in the room, and cost the hotel in room service we never got. But after the disgusting way we were treated regarding the breakfast issue, I did not dare complain about this as well. I realized the assistant manager was fully capable of standing in the middle of the room and stating he smells nothing. Why bother? They probably know already and don't care. After all, the maid was in there everyday. To put icing on the cake, in the middle of our last night there, someone tried their key several times into our lock throughout the night. I kept hearing the beeps from the door saying it rejected the card. I listened intently on my side of the door and heard nothing further. Actually it was a bit scary. I did not dare open the door. It is too bad because some of the staff was really nice and gave us good customer service without any problems. I blame the management for being completely unprofessional and ruining a potentially nice hotel.

bell'hotel
Posted: Tue, Oct 30 2007
Sono stato in questo hotel solo un paio di giorni durante una gita. Sembra un posto bello, con un buon servizio e un'ottima gestione. Nell'hotel fa caldo, ma l'aria condizionata funziona bene.