ANT Hostel Barcelona — Hotel in Barcelona

This an affordable, modern hostel located near the heart of the views and sites that Barcelona has to offer. A 15 minute walk to the beach, across the street from a really nice park used in the 1888 world's fair. 10 minutes to the gothic quarter and a 20ish minute walk to La Segrada Familia church. They offer many of the common ammentities for purchase. Bike rental is €10 daily (there's a place a couple blocks away offering €5 bike rentals). You don't really need a bike to get around. The common spaces are nice. Comfortable furniture. The free breakfast was pretty lacking. Prepackaged crossiants and muffins, white bread, and hot dogs?, Oh and a buffet of condiments for your bread and hot dogs. I'm not hating on it. It is a FREE breakfast. The rooms are set up in a pod stlye.i stayed in a 4 bed "room". I really stayed in a 12 bed "room" with partitions in groups of 4. Each partition (group of 4 beds) had a shared bathroom. The sliding door to the bathroom did not lock. That would have been nice for privacy. The shower was not well set up. There was no place to put soap or shampoo, there was no light in the shower, so it was kind of dark, and the shower floor did not prevent water from spilling over the shower area and into the rest of the bathroom! Luckily everyone was careful, but I definitely saw this as a design flaw. Each bed had a foam mattress, individual light with switch, standard Europe power outlet and 2 USB ports. My USB ports did not charge any of my electronic devices. There was a curtain to draw in front of each individual bed which was nice for privacy, but having the curtains drawn, tended to make the bed area hot from a lack of air circulation and your natural body heat. Back to the pod style. In a traditional hostel, staying in a 4 bed room usually means that you have 4 beds in a room behind a locked door with walls, climate control (windows or hvac), and a ceiling. Your room is separated from everyone else in the hostel, and usually means that sound and light from other rooms in the hostel do no effect you. Because of the pod style set up at this hostel, 3 rooms of 4 people each enetered through the same locked door. There is no individual climate control nor celings between pods. This mean that is one pod is noisy or has a light on, the other 2 pods hear EVERYTHING. Including if someone gets up to go to the bathroom. I did not have too much of an issue with the pod situation, just don't be surprised when your 4 person room seems more like a 12 person room. While I was staying there, there was a wide range of people staying in this hostel. Anything from young children (2 years old) with their parents, college kids, to people in their 50s +. No problem, just an observation. This is not a...

There is some false advertising here. We thought we were getting our own room for 4 people (with bathroom). It turns out, they don't have any 4-person rooms. They are dorms for 12 people, with partition walls in between every 4 bunks. So there are three sections to each room and you get a section. As the partition walls don't reach the ceiling, and the door to your section doesn't lock, you're actually just in a 12 person dorm. There are no ceilings on any of the sections so you can hear everything anyone in another section is saying.

Because of that, it was incredible noisy at night. We also happened to be in the dorm at the front of the hostel, so we also had the street noise to contend with at night. A couple of nights some of us got almost no sleep at all. The doors are all sliding, so there's the constant rumbling noise of that every time someone uses their loo or comes and goes.

It was good to have our own bathroom but it was pretty grotty honestly and smelled quite bad from the start. The shower was fine, ok pressure and hot.

The lockers under the beds are good. Very spacious. You just have to be a bit careful opening them when there are other people around as the front opens out quite far.

In at least one bunk, the USB port did not charge a phone, but the plug sockets worked fine and everyone had their own bunk light. The curtains block out a good deal of light but it can also end up being quite hot in there.

There are shoe racks outside the sections and hooks in the bathrooms.

We only used the kitchen facilities for cups of tea and one rudimentary meal but we had no problems.

The hostel staff were nice, the bin in the bathroom was emptied daily and reception kindly printed out our boarding passes for us (although unfortunately the quality wasn't high enough and they didn't work at the airport!).

The location is great, right opposite Ciutadella Park, and quite close to the beach. The price wasn't bad for a hostel.

Only really recommended if you're a heavy sleeper who's only in the city...

Confusing Hostel with Hostile

Unless you are into multisensorial suffering, it's difficult to recommend this establishment. Perhaps at one time it wasn't so bad as the creative, clearly homemade bunk beds and bathrooms are not bad conceptually. However every expense was spared I'm their construction and maintenance. Most things are falling apart. The beds are just the right size, if you're from the Shire. Although, I must admit I didn't see any Hobbits among the clientele. Perhaps it's not their high travel season. The ventilation of the rooms was meager at best. At certain times of the day, the air conditioning works ish. But for some reason is shut off at night. The rooms, being sealed, quickly turn into saunas as the guests turn in. They soon find themselves drenched in sweat. Thank god the mattresses are only made of some cheap sponge material that whisk that moisture away to right where it came from, allowing it to pool all around you. The added benefit of what can only be a cost savings measure is that by the morning, even when not full, the rooms achieve an odor rarely experienced outside of the filthiest locker rooms at capacity. Allowing the AC sometime in the morning to do what it can to clear the almost visible air provides an additional, unannounced amenity to the guests in the form of a common cold. An additional assault to the senses to look forward to is the nature of the establishment to attract not just those who snore, but who apparently are suffering from life threatening respiratory conditions. From the moment the heads of these individuals hit their thin pillows a cacophony ensues that not only never ceases, it varies throughout the night, producing sounds one would not associate with humans, or even mammals. At least they...