This is a fantastic, very comfortable hotel to stay at in Barcelona if you're looking for proximity to the Gothic Quarter and El Born, at a reasonable price, with free wifi and other amenities.
My boyfriend and I stayed here for 4 nights recently and couldn't believe how nice our room was, for what we paid. After I read about the hotel in a Barcelona travel guide on the website Design Sponge, we booked one of the smaller rooms they had available (68 euro/night during the off season). When we arrived, we were delighted to open the door and see a huge king bed! The linens were really nice quality, the closets on each side of the room were very spacious for storing luggage and shoes, and we were also surprised by the size of the bathroom, which was quite generous by European hotel standards and featured an enormous tub. The lights in the room were nice and bright, and you could control them from the bed, which was cool. The lobby was also really cute, and had a sitting area with free coffee and tea and cookies, and lots of magazines to read. They had a fridge full of free bottled water as well, which was amazing because you don't just get free water at restaurants in Europe. So we took many of those and carried them around with us!
It was pretty easy to find and check in to the hotel. You have to check in at a related hotel, the Hotel Chic & Basic Born, right around the corner at Calle Princesa 50. The staff there speaks English and they have a nice lobby with wifi. At one point the door to our safe jammed and we couldn't open it to access our cash/passports we were storing inside, so it was a bit annoying to have to leave our building and walk around the corner to ask to have it fixed, but they had it fixed within about a day and a half. (There is also a phone in the lobby of the Zoo Hotel to call the Born Hotel if you need it - I just wanted to make sure I could speak English with someone in person so that's why I didn't use the phone.)
As for the location, it was very easy to walk to all the places we wanted to see, from the Rambla to Barceloneta and even the Eixample. For some places that were a bit farther away, like Parc Guell or Montjuic, we just took cabs - there were many cabs on Calle Princesa and Passeig Picasso that were easy to catch from the street outside the hotel. Regarding safety, many websites cautioned that El Born can be a little unsafe at night, but we didn't find that to be the case at all, and felt very safe the whole time. If you're smart with your bags and wallet, you won't have a problem. There were homeless people sleeping outside the hotel each night (the hotel entrance is covered under a long portico that stretches the length of the block), but they weren't disruptive at all. It was completely fine, like any other large city.
Our room faced in to the courtyard in the back of the building, so we found it relatively quiet. One thing that we didn't like was the smell coming up from the laundry facilities below - we often wanted to fully open our window to air out the room, but the smell coming up from below was a little funny, so we shut the windows after a while. There were also some pigeons that wanted to come in! But overall it was fine just opening the windows a little bit.
Would totally stay here again! read more