Barbieri Hostel in Madrid – Who The Hell Gave This Place Good Reviews?!?!

At the beginning of our planning, we used hostels.com to book four hostels – one in Lisbon, one in Porto, one in Madrid, and one in Barcelona – we based our decisions on which hostel had the best reviews on this website.  While looking into Montpellier France, we realized that two people who can share one bed can book a budget hotel room for basically the same price as a hostel since hostels always charge per person/per bed!  Up until now, the hostels have been pretty awesome and we haven’t regretted our oversight on this, but Barbieri Hostel is likely going to change this and make us avoid hostels in the future!

When we arrived, the first thing I noticed was that the building smelled like a porta-potty (editor’s note: that’s a portable toilet for those not in the know), but the hostel is on the second floor and by the time we climbed the stairs the smell had either dissipated or I had gotten used to it.   At the check-in counter, I noticed they had a small sign posting the prices of beds (which none of the other hostels have had) so I figured they might have vacancies for people who just wandered in.  I ventured to ask if they had a private room available – when we booked online they didn’t so we booked for a 7-bed dorm, which neither of us was looking forward to at all.  It turned out there was a private room available for the first 3 nights, but not for the last, so we decided we would take the private for the first 3 and then move to the dorm for the last night.  The guy made the adjustments to our bill (refusing to credit us our online deposit because we changed rooms!) and we paid in cash to avoid the 2.8% surcharge they have for using visa.  He then informed us that all facilities are closed for cleaning from 11-2 everyday, handed us the dingiest looking sheets possible, and showed us to our room.

The hostel has a weird sort of u-shaped layout, with long narrow hallways connecting the rooms together.  The dorm we were originally supposed to be in is directly in front of the reception desk, the bathrooms are in the hallway next to that, then the kitchen, then the living room is in the next hallway, and then our room in the last hallway (editor’s note: “And NO and THEN!!“).  The private room we paid extra for is only about the size of a walk-in closet and is equipped with a bunk bed (which doesn’t have stairs to get to the top bunk!) and a pathetic 3-foot tall plastic box that they call a “locker” and you’re supposed to pay 1 euro a day to rent.  Since the doors to the rooms don’t have locks, we don’t feel it will be safe to leave our valuables in this “locker” which anyone can easily pick up and walk off with or just break into, so we’ll have to carry our stuff around with us 

The bed doesn’t look like anything I want to sleep in and the blankets are pathetic fleece-like throws which look old and disgusting.  The floor is literally falling apart – there are missing tiles all over our room – and the bathrooms here are worse than the ones in my high school gym.  Another big problem – the Internet connection here is flaky and keeps dropping off so we’ll have to see if we can find somewhere else for Paul to work.  Both of us are wondering how this place got a 79% overall rating on hostels.com and the 83% security rating bewilders us.  According to Paul, who made the booking, this was the top rated hostel in Madrid that had availability when he originally booked and it’s downhill from there!  This is going to be a long four nights… Thank God we’ll be in hotels once we get to France!