The Cold War Museum — Attraction in Prague

Incredible, especially for a history buff such as myself. It is a guided tour of the bunker underneath the Jalta hotel constructed during the communist era of Czechoslovakia. The highlight of the experience absolutely has to be our tour guide, Stanislav. He was informative and very knowledgeable, answering any questions people had. Most of all he was witty and made what would otherwise be dull (according to my friends) aspects of history interesting.

As the bunker is underneath the hotel we struggled to find the entrance at first, though I do not believe that the attraction's rating should suffer for this as this was our own incompetence. Turns out it was quite clearly signposted by the hotel entrance. Being supposedly learned university students we should have spotted it.

Booking is extremely easy, it is done online but you pay in person. We did not have to wait long for our tour as others have suggested. My only gripe is that you don't get to see the whole bunker as the largest parts of it are in use by the hotel itself, but as we already knew this before paying this attraction absolutely deserves 5 stars.

Miluji...

Great museum and fantastic guide. Highly recommended! Just be aware - the museum is in the basement of an up market hotel. The sign for the museum is a tiny plaque outside the hotel on the street that is tiny and very easy to miss! Like the size of a dinner plate. We met people who were staying in the hotel itself and still couldn’t find the tour!

You go into the hotel foyer then meet the guide. There is absolutely NO information in the hotel foyer- and the hotel staff are extremely unhelpful and on the day were there, after asking if we’re in the correct place, the hotel clerk nearly bit our heads off. The rudest man we met on an entire month long holiday in Europe. The tour is a complete inconvenience to the fancy hotel it seems! They are making their living off tourists, yet despise then?

As said though, once the tour guide appears and takes you downstairs to the basement it’s fantastic! I’d recommend that the tour operators simply place a brochure or simple sign somewhere inside the hotel foyer so that people actually know they’re in the correct place, then they don’t have to ‘annoy’ the very busy...

If you are a person interested in cold war stuff and have some basic information, then it will be quite exciting and interesting. The guide was really great and as I understood, it was a private effort to reconstruct as much of the bunker as possible. They did a great job in this way. Creating something interesting out of several underground bunker rooms (such bunkers, as they said, are around 800 only in Prague) was clearly quite a bit of effort.

On the other hand, in my opinion, the tour is pretty overpriced for Prague, even considering all the resources spent on it, especially if you have already visited military museum in Prague (free to enter) and have some idea about the cold war and Czechoslovakia. When I googled it, the price was shown as 300 CZK but at the entry I found out that it got more - 400 CZK.

So, price was the main issue - had it cost 150-200 CZK, this would be a 5-star review.

Would I have visited it knowing all it pros and cons in advance?...