Ξενοδοχείο Ίκαρος — Hotel in Municipality of Piraeus

Where to begin...||||My boyfriend and I were coming in to Athens on a late flight, the next morning we were catching an early ferry to Paros, so we needed a place to catch a few zzzz's. I left the choice of accommodation to my boyfriend - my only criteria was that it was close to the port, cheap - as we wouldn't be there for too long and looked comfortable enough. In comes Hotel Ikaros.||||Close to the port - yes. right across the road in fact.||Cheap - 35 euros... ok considering it's very close to where we need to be||Comfortable - definitely not. ||||Our plane is delayed an hour or so, and after the bus ride from the airport to the port, its about 2am. We step off the bus and attempt to navigate our way to the hotel. Thank goodness that took all of about 2 minutes, It was very easily located. "Hooray!" we thought "sleep is nearing". ||||I remember then stepping inside the hotel and being greeted by the grumpiest looking man behind the front desk, I still to this day remember what he looked like. At the time I wasn't paying attention to my surroundings - i was too exhausted, at this point in time I was looking very forward to sleeping in a horizontal position in a bed.||||Ignoring the decor and surroundings of the reception area we followed grumpy looking man up to the first level, to our room. Our room was easy to get to (because we had come in so late) - it was the first door you see when on the first floor. We had told him we were catching the first ferry of the morning so we needed to be up early, he told us he would come and wake us up early - how nice of him! perhaps he wasn't as grumpy as he appeared to be.||We open our door and flick the lights on, dump our bags down and say thanks to grumpy. So the room is looking a bit dingy. I go to the bathroom to take a shower..it's very small..but the hand held shower hose is the only shower related object in there. no base or curtain? water would go everywhere! "forget it" I think and tell my boyfriend, we laugh and just get into bed. ||||The bed is a double, it only had a fitted sheet on it, no other sheets. We could go see grumpy at reception and ask for another, but why bother, its around 2:15am and we just want to sleep. Well we get onto the bed and lay down, "at last.. rest!" I don't mind to much that the springs are jabbing into my spine, because at least i'm kind of comfortable... that is until my boyfriend and I both find ourselves rolling towards one another on the account of the mattress being broken and rolling us into the middle. We stay in the middle of the bed and attempt to sleep. The plus side of all of this was that the air conditioning in the room was incredibly cold... now if only we had a blanket to wrap ourselves in. So, I ended up drifting in and out of sleep for an hour. After that I was to cold and uncomfortable, so I decided to stay up and use the wifi for the rest of my stay - the wifi was incredibly efficient I must add (see not everything was bad). At the time I was thinking that we could have just saved some money and sat at the port through the early hours of the morning, but safety first. It was about 5:30am when grumpy came and started waking up people who needed to be up in time for the ferry. We checked out and said goodbye to grumpy. ||||Overall my experience at Hotel Ikaros was bad. But it's a bad experience that I look back on fondly and laugh and say to my boyfriend "hey, remember that time when we had to stay at that hotel". Terrible, but memorable in a good way, and such a handy location if like us you are arriving into Athens and need to catch an early morning ferry from Pireas. We were only there for about 4 hours, I couldn't have bared to stay any longer!||||Strangely enough I would recommend this to my younger backpacker friends because I feel like every young person should experience this kind of accommodation, not only does it make you appreciate other places, but it also makes you have a good laugh and always is a good...

Due to the ferry strike in Greece, we were looking for a hotel to spend a night near the ferry. At 7:30 am we were happy to find this place right away, before a lot of other travelers would start their hunt for a place to stay. We were greeted by two grumpy looking men, who spend quite some time talking to eachother before the elder one said we could have a room for 40 euro’s at 10 am. Relieved we went away to have breakfast and to make a plan for our day. On our return we met two ladies who were just leaving, because the owner had showed them a dirty horrible looking room for 50€. They were promised a room for €40 as well. Then it was our turn. The same room, with garbage Still in the bin, dirty curtains and a bathroom in which you could barely turn was 60€ for us. We pointed out to the owner that 40€ was promised to us and that we heard him say 50€ just a minute ago. In response the owner just shrugged his large shoulders and told us he could not help that the prices had changed. ‘It just happened’ as he clearified. Then he and his grumpy companion just stared to us with a blank face and offerde to call a taxi to take us to a hotel 5k away. |We had a bad feeling this wouldnt be an improvement so we left to continue our search. ||Bottomline: a disgrace to the - otherwise kind- people we have met in Athens so far, just making the best of the business opportunity the strike posed to the shabby hotel owners of this estabishment..at the expanse of...

So a balanced review. 35€ for a double room and you are about 500m from Port Gate 8. The room was small but generally clean, however there were whiskers where someone had shaved at the sink before us. The bed was clean and comfortable and there was a fridge in the room (no tea or coffee making facilities but not necessarily expecting it). My biggest problem was that the room smelt of cigarette smoke due to people smoking outside the window in the alleyway. Also, at night, I could see people as they walked past our door due to the gap around the door.

We only briefly met any staff, but they were friendly and efficient.

Basically if you need somewhere cheap to stay over night, there are probably...