Looks incredibly cool, falls way short.
It's apparently just been bought by a new Chain, and will be closing soon to undergo revamping and rebranding, but that hasn't helped it yet.
Everything is kind of a modern-industrial design, and looks very cool. It's incredibly non-traditional, and that helps it feel kind of fun. But it eventually just all becomes average. The pictures online make it look way cooler than it is (but that's not unique to this hotel at all). The lobby is big and bright, though reception sort of hides around a corner. the floors with the guest rooms are very dark, and lit almost exclusively by bright LED-style signs in green that note each room number. It feels very cool and interesting at first, but eventually makes the hallways just sort of feel dark and creepy.
The room we had was very large, spacious. High ceilings. Painted cool, cool art. But it wasn't lit well enough. The main overhead light was insufficient, and even coupled with the bedside lamps there wasn't much happening. Concrete floors as far as the eye can see. Rather interestingly, there's also no phone in the room to call the front desk. In the bathroom, things were largely okay. Our bathroom door was just a sliding door that neither locked nor actually closed all the way. Not a huge issue for a couple necessarily, but there's an expectation of privacy that some may have which wouldn't be met here. The shower was alright, as it had a decent rainforest type shower head thingy. But the part that was quite awful was the shower curtain. Say the shower is 8 feet from front to back. The shower curtain is a series of 4-5 rubber slabs each only about 6 inches wide, closely hung together, and zip tied into a single location along the shower rod so it can't be moved. This is all to say that there's a good foot at the front of the shower with no curtain, and several feet at the back with no curtain. This leads to water getting absolutely everywhere no matter how hard you try. Given the location of the showerhead, half the water falls and splashes off your body straight out on to the floor. Just...weird.
But the real reason this place gets two stars was a specific instance with the front desk staff. On the last night we were there I, stupidly, filled a water bottle and tossed it on to the bed without closing the top. 15 minutes later I realized the bottle was nearly empty and the mattress, sheets, and both duvets were quite soaked with very cold water. Our only choice was to walk down to the front desk (as there's no phone) and ask for some new duvets and some towels. Perhaps a new mattress if at all possible... But upon presenting the front desk with our predicament, the staff member said that he was sorry but housekeeping was gone for the night. When asked if he had access to the housekeeping closet, he said yes, but he didn't know where it was. When pressed if he could please look for it, so that we might have something dry to sleep with, he quite begrudgingly got up to go look for it. He returned with one extra towel, and one extra duvet. That's it. That's either all the extra they had on hand, all he could find because it was seemingly his 2nd day on staff, or he simply didn't feel like helping us more. So that just wasn't very cool. We eventually made it work, stacking towels on the wet spot to make it feel as dry as possible, and using one duvet sideways as to avoid the wet spots. But overall it left a very bad taste in our mouth and really undid the "Our front desk is open 24 hours if you need absolutely anything at all!" greeting we received when checking in.
Also, the hotel bar was closed but we were never told until we went looking for it for cocktails one night after several hours wandering the city on foot. Turns out there was a new law passed in Czech Republic that all transactions need to be reconciled online and sent to the governmental tax office to help avoid tax fraud when businesses failed to report earnings. That wasn't up and running (for whatever reason) in the hotel yet, so alas, no bar.
Your TL;DR version is that it's cost effective, very cool looking, has a great location given the cost, but at the end of the day just wasn't a good experience and we won't be coming back the next time we're in Prague. It's an upscale hostel at best while advertising itself as so much more. read more
