Bodhi Panama City — Hotel in Bella Vista

5 stars if you have bottom bunk, 3 stars if you have top bunk. 5 stars for the dorm on the opposite end of the pool, 3 stars for the upstairs dorm (#1). Bottom bunks have privacy curtains, top bunks do not. Ground level dorm is very clean, stayed there my first 3 nights before San Blas. Walked to the toilet in my socks fine. Felt bad for people on beds without privacy curtains who had to pay the same price as those with curtains.

Showers leave no room for dry things and are doors that open inward so you have to be flexible to not flash anyone when you open the door to reach for your towel or clothes. Seems to be a Bodhi thing to not have private showers because the one in El Valle was just a curtain where everything also got soaked.

Bathroom in upstairs dorm, where I stayed for 1 night after San Blas, was gross and the light only lit up 1 of the 3 showers in there.

If I had only stayed in the downstairs dorm, this would have been a more positive review. It's unfortunate that they charge $14 for very different products. The beds with no privacy curtains should be $10 and the beds with curtains in the upstairs dorm overall should be $12.

They turn AC on around 9:30pm and turn it off around 7am. The pancakes for breakfast are thick and...

This hostel could be really nice but apparently smoking is allowed all throughout the courtyard. You can’t enjoy it without constant secondhand smoke from people smoking cigarettes… which is a bummer because the outside area is really nice.

What’s worse is that the courtyard is small and in between the lobby and main dorm room, so the smoke gets circulated throughout all those places. It’s not just annoying, it’s unhealthy and literally causes cancer.

They could easily designate the front entrance as a smoke zone and keep the courtyard smoke-free.

Also, Bodhi claims to donate their profits towards climate issues and animal rights but serves pancakes made with cow milk and oatmeal with extra milk… it’d be very easy to make the breakfast plant-based without changing the taste at all.

Hopefully they can make these two changes to line up with their values a bit more.

From their website: “At Bodhi Hostels we dream of a better world for the future generations, that is why we care. Part of our profits are used towards tackling the following issues: climate change, plastic pollution and...

It's a beautiful place & value for money with big, clean private rooms but the staff are really unhelpful and unfriendly. I booked direct and didn't get a confirmation for over a week even though I emailed a couple of times. The wifi doesn't work so well in the evenings as EVERYONE just sits on their phone/laptop using it. Also, really hard to actually get in when you arrive as there's a sign directing you to go to the 'house on the right' when that gate is actually where you go in. The sign needs to be written either in Spanish or in correct English (as currently it's super confusing & grammatically incoherent). We came back on Saturday night quite late and we'd been locked out! There's a door code but someone had also locked the double lock from the inside so we couldn't enter the hostel! We waited half an hour to get in. Overall not a...