“Bed bugs, great volunteers, small kitchen and poor management.”
The hostel offers great space for community, and volunteers are the reason it has such a good vibe. They make Fatima a fun and interesting stay. Without them, the place is just okay thanks to its very central location in Candelaria and its restaurant and bar. They bring good live music and make it lively (again, the volunteers and one awesome dude in charge of these events). Great business potential if management improved. It would be worth investing a bit more to add at least one more cleaning lady or person. First, for hygiene, there should be a toilet brush in every bathroom so guests can clean their own mess; there are at least 15 toilets in this building and ONE cleaning lady. She works 7 days a week, all day, and is completely alone to do her job. Want to do laundry? You can’t do it yourself; you have to pay the hostel, then their cleaning lady will do it for you, between preparing breakfast and cleaning everyone’s sheets. She goes up and down three floors every day to make “your great stay” happen. In short, for those of us with basic human empathy, it is hard to see one person work this much with little to no help. Second, we had bed bugs during our stay and received poor attention and help to resolve the situation. After being minimized and accused, they gave us another room (a dorm room) and said it was private. Surprise: the next day we got into our room and there were two newly arrived guests. Then we had to see the poor cleaning lady dry all of our stuff (we stayed months in Bogotá so you can imagine how much clothes we had). After 5 hours, when we got our stuff, it was still damp. Why? Because the cleaning lady had so much to do and so many clothes from other people to wash that she put too much into the drying machine. We offered to do it ourselves but they didn’t want anyone else using the machines. We then had to fight to get our clothes dried again, paid for a steamer to wash our backpacks and anything that couldn’t go into their machines. This was all on the day of our check out, so we lost our bus tickets for that evening. ANYWAYS, it was hell. WORSE PART: we heard them talking about doing their “protocol” for bed bugs so that they could still rent our room that same night. And the owner was bitching at us because we were letting new guests know we had had bed bugs. I mean, if you see me steaming all my stuff for hours and you ask me why, I am not going to lie, am I? I'm not souless.
SilviaIl y a 2 semaines